Anne was born on June 12, 1929, three years after her sister, Margot, in the town of Frankfurt-on-Main in Germany. Four years later, in the summer of 1933, the Frank family moved to Holland because Hitler had come to power in Germany and had introduced strict laws which discriminated against Jews. In addition, gangs of Nazi thugs would roam the streets, beating up Jews for no reason — except that they were Jews.
Anne attended the Montessori kindergarten and grade school in Amsterdam after the Germans invaded Holland in May, 1940, but the anti-Semitic regime from which the Frank family had sought to escape in Germany caught up with them. Anne and Margot, along with thousands of other Jewish children, were no longer allowed to attend schools of their own choosing and were obliged to go to only Jewish schools. Anne herself did not mind this, readily adapting to the new environment, making new friends and finding old ones among her classmates.
Realizing how dangerous the political situation was becoming, Mr. Frank prepared a refuge where his family could go into hiding, rather than submitting to arrest by the Nazis and being dispatched to concentration camps and to almost certain death. At the beginning of July, 1942, when it would have been foolish to delay not going into hiding, the Franks, and then a few days later, a family called the Van Daans, moved into the "Secret Annexe" in the building where Mr. Frank's offices and warehouse were situated; overnight, they simply vanished from sight.
As a child, Anne was bright and lively, not considered by her parents and their friends to be as intelligent and as beautiful as her sister, Margot, but nonetheless loved for her humor and personality. Anne does not conceal her awareness of this attitude in her diary, and her resentment of it perhaps adds to the irony that it should be Anne's name, rather than Margot's, that has become known to posterity. Perhaps this early, slight adversity strengthened in Anne a resolve to shine in some way and to prove to her family and to the world that she was not just the younger sister of the beautiful and talented Margot Frank.
