A Jewish girl in hiding, Anne Frank began to journal after receiving a red-and-white checkered autograph book for her thirteenth birthday, June 12, 1942. Little did she know what those pages would eventually contain a story of perseverance, courage, and hope through the horrors of Nazi persecution of the Jews.

Anne lived with her father and mother, Otto and Edith, and her older sister, Margot, in Frankfurt, Germany. They moved to Amsterdam when Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany, but when Hitler invaded the Netherlands in 1940, their rights were stripped away again. In 1942, Amsterdam Jews were forcibly deported to concentration camps, so the family went into hiding in July with the help of Otto's loyal employees. Other Jewish friends joined them in hiding, and Anne chronicled all their experiences in her diary. In August 1944, the German police stormed their hiding place. Anne, her mother, and her sister were separated from her father Otto, and all three of the Frank women died in the concentration camps (Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz). Otto Frank survived Auschwitz and edited and published Anne's diary, known in English as The Diary of a Young Girl, in 1947.

In 1944, the year before her death in the concentration camp, Anne wrote of her ambitions to be a journalist: "I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me!" Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl has become a classic firsthand account of the horrors of Nazi occupation from the perspective of an articulate and deeply-feeling child.