Anne Frank

Anne Frank was a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam under German occupation. The occupation government issued discriminatory laws, then forced Jews to register and live apart, and in 1941 Anne was barred from her school. No court ever tried her. In the eyes of the occupiers, her offence was being Jewish. On 4 August 1944 German police, led by an SD sergeant, Karl Silberbauer, raided the Secret Annex where her family had been hiding for two years. They were held in Amsterdam, then sent to Westerbork, and on 3 September 1944 deported on the last transport to Auschwitz. Anne and her sister Margot were moved to Bergen-Belsen in late October. She died there in February or March 1945, most likely of typhus.

Her father, Otto, was the only member of the family to survive. He returned to Amsterdam in June 1945 and published her diary in Dutch in 1947 as Het Achterhuis, followed by an English edition in 1952. In 2009 UNESCO added the diary to its Memory of the World register, and the stage adaptation won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A girl hunted as an enemy of the state became one of the most widely read witnesses against it.