Anne Frank: The Biography

For people all over the world, Anne Frank, the vivacious, intelligent Jewish girl with a crooked smile and huge dark eyes, has become the "human face of the Holocaust". Her diary of twenty-five months in hiding, a precious record of her family's struggle to keep hope alive through the darkest days of this century, has touched the hearts of millions.

Here, after five decades, is the first biography of this remarkable figure. Drawing on exclusive interviews with family and friends, on previously unavailable correspondence and on documents long kept secret, Melissa Muller creates a subtle portrait of her famous subject. This is the flesh-and-blood Anne Frank, unsentimentalised and so all the more affecting - Anne Frank restored to history. Muller traces Frank's life from an idyllic childhood in an assimilated family, well-established in Frankfurt banking circles, to her passionate adolescence in German-occupied Amsterdam and her desperate end in Bergen Belsen at the age of fifteen. Full of revelations, this richly textured biography casts new light on Anne's relations with her mother, whom she treats harshly in the diary, and examines the enduring mystery: who betrayed the families hiding in the annex just when liberation was at hand?

Including a Note by Miep Gies, who hid the Frank family for two years, this is an indispensable volume for all those who seek a deeper, richer understanding of Anne Frank and the brutal times in which she lived and died.