June 12, 1929

June 12, 1929, marks the birth of Anne Frank, whose short life and diary became inseparable in the book’s account of persecution, adolescence, and the survival of a written record. The same calendar date, thirteen years later, marks the beginning of the diary she kept while living under Nazi occupation; in this way, a birthday becomes both a biographical fact and the threshold of a lasting document.

Birth and family background

Anne was born on June 12, 1929, into a Jewish family. Her sister Margot had been born in Frankfurt am Main in 1926. Anne’s father, Otto Frank, moved to the Netherlands in 1933, where he became managing director of the Dutch Opekta Company; her mother, Edith Frank, followed him that September. Anne and Margot stayed with their grandmother in Aachen before Margot joined their parents in December and Anne followed in February. The date therefore precedes a childhood already shaped by the family’s flight from Germany and relocation to the Netherlands.

Anne’s birthday also fixes her age at successive turning points. She began writing her diary on her thirteenth birthday, and was thirteen when her family went into hiding in the Secret Annex. She was fifteen when circumstances forced her to stop writing. The span from childhood into adolescence is thus marked not only by years but by the diary’s dates and changing purposes.

A birthday becomes the diary’s beginning

Anne kept her diary from June 12, 1942, to August 1, 1944. At first she wrote for herself, addressing the diary as a friend named Kitty. The opening date gives the record a personal beginning: the young writer who began on her birthday could set down experiences she did not otherwise share, while the diary’s later form would preserve her observations of life in hiding and the people around her.

In 1944, after hearing Gerrit Bolkestein of the Dutch government in exile call for wartime letters and diaries to be collected after the war, Anne decided to make a book from her writing. She began revising and editing it, cutting some passages and adding others from memory, even as she continued the original diary. The date June 12 consequently marks the beginning of both the private record and the writing history that would divide it into an original version and an author-edited version.

From private record to published work

After the eight residents of the Secret Annex were arrested on August 4, 1944, Anne’s diaries were found on the floor by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Miep put them away for safekeeping. After the war, once Anne was known to be dead, she gave them unread to Otto Frank. He selected material from Anne’s original and revised versions, producing a shorter text for publication in 1947. His choices reflected the book’s intended length and contemporary publishing conventions, as well as his wish to omit passages he considered unflattering to his wife and the other residents.

Following Otto’s death in 1980, Anne’s manuscripts went to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. The institute investigated the diary’s authenticity and published the versions and the results of its research in a critical edition. The Anne Frank-Fonds later commissioned Mirjam Pressler to prepare an expanded edition for general readers, supplementing Otto’s selection with passages from Anne’s two versions. The edition contains approximately 30 percent more material. Across these stages, the original birthday date remains a stable point in a record whose contents and public shape changed through revision, selection, investigation, and republication.

The date’s significance

June 12, 1929, is more than a biographical entry because it returns in the diary’s chronology as June 12, 1942, when Anne began writing. The first date locates her birth; the second begins a sustained act of observation that continued through the danger and confinement of the Secret Annex. The book’s account of the diary’s transmission further links that beginning to its afterlife: Anne’s own rewriting, Otto’s editorial selection, and later expanded publication all shaped what readers could encounter.

The record also holds a clear limit. Anne’s final entry is dated August 1, 1944, and the residents were arrested three days later. The diary that began on a birthday did not reach its planned wartime conclusion in Anne’s own hands; its survival depended on the people who preserved it and on later editorial and documentary work. June 12 therefore stands at once for a life begun and for the opening of a text that outlasted its author.