June 12th 1942: Anne Frank receives her diary

On this day in 1942, Anne Frank received a diary for her 13th birthday. She had seen the book, bound with red and white checkered cloth, a few days before and her father gave it to her for her birthday. Frank, a Jewish German national, lived in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her family went into hiding in 1942 to escape the persecution of the Jewish population, and Frank documented her experiences. Her group was eventually betrayed after two years in hiding and Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from typhus in March 1945. Her father survived, and upon his return to Amsterdam found his daughter’s diary, which documented her life from 14th June 1942 to 1st August 1944, and had it translated and published.

Anne Frank would have turned 83 today