Every year, like clockwork, the Italian press returns to the story of Annelies "Anne" Frank, the German-Jewish girl who kept a diary during the Nazi persecutions of the early 1940s, later published across the world after the end of the war.

The setting is Amsterdam, 1942. The Germans occupy the country and are persecuting Jewish people. A Jewish family, the Franks, shuts itself away in an attic of Mr Frank's spice factory together with some friends. Despite the extremely harsh living conditions, young Anne manages to find moments of lightheartedness and entrusts her thoughts to the pages of her diary. But one dreadful day the Franks are arrested and deported.

Anne Frank's life

Anne was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1929, to parents of Jewish origin, a few years after her sister Margot.

The Frank family had moved from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933, the year the Nazis took control of Germany. In 1940 the family found itself trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands. As the persecutions intensified, in 1942, it became increasingly difficult for the Franks to avoid being caught during the round-ups. Anne Frank's father therefore decided to go into hiding with his family in a dwelling created at the back of his factory, also taking in Hermann van Pels with his wife and their sixteen-year-old son Peter and, shortly afterwards, the dentist Fritz Pfeffer.

In the secret annex Anne continued writing her personal diary (received as a gift on her thirteenth birthday), in the form of letters addressed to an imaginary friend. In it she recorded intimate thoughts and reflections, describing what happened each day: the fear of the war, her feelings for Peter, conflict with her parents and her desire to become a writer once peace returned.

On 4 August 1944, following a tip-off by an informer to the Sicherheitsdienst, the German police in Amsterdam, the group was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Anne and her sister Margot were subsequently transferred to Bergen-Belsen. They died of typhus between February and March of the following year.

Anne Frank's diary

When Anne began her diary in June 1942, she had just turned thirteen. After only a few pages, the images of school, classmates and more or less imaginary romances give way to the story of a long period in hiding: days spent peeling potatoes, reciting poems, reading, writing, arguing, waiting, fearing the worst.

Riches, beauty, everything can be lost, but the happiness in your heart can only be dimmed; it will always be there, as long as you live, to make you happy again. Whenever you feel lonely or sad, try to look up at the sky when the weather is so beautiful. Not at the houses and the rooftops, but at the sky. As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you'll know that you're pure within and that you will find happiness once more.

Anne Frank

Otto Frank, the only survivor of the family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that Anne's diary had been saved, and devoted his efforts to having it published, in 1947.

"I see us eight in the secret annex as if we were a little piece of blue sky surrounded by dark rain clouds," Anne had the courage to write. Obeying a clear vocation as a writer, Anne wanted and knew how to leave a testimony of herself and of the experience of the other people in hiding. The first edition of the Diary nonetheless underwent many cuts, revisions and alterations. The text has now been restored to its original integrity, and it delivers a new image: that of a real, living girl — ironic, passionate, irreverent, driven by a joyful will to live, already adult in her reflections.

I see us eight in the secret annex as if we were a little piece of blue sky surrounded by dark rain clouds.

Anne Frank

Anne Frank's diary, the 1959 film

The tragic story of the young victim of Nazi barbarism has been told in numerous works, books and films. Published throughout the world, the girl's diary was also adapted for the stage, and in 1959 director George Stevens turned it into a film — viewable in full on YouTube — casting a girl who had never acted in cinema before, Millie Perkins, in the role of the thirteen-year-old protagonist.

The film was presented at the twelfth Cannes Film Festival and received numerous accolades, among them three Academy Awards (for Best Supporting Actress, Best Cinematography in Black and White, and Best Art Direction9). It takes the form of a long flashback experienced through the memories of Otto Frank. The opening scene shows him returning to Amsterdam in 1945 and entering the attic, where Anne's diary plunges him into memories of the flight, the time in hiding, the waiting and the dramatic deportation.