96 Fun Facts About Anne Frank

In which city was Anne born in 1929?

Frankfurt: after Hitler came to power, her parents moved the family to the Netherlands, where Anne soon felt at home at her new school.

What was Anne Frank's full first name?

Annelies, sometimes spelt Anneliese; in 1941 the Nazis stripped her of her citizenship, leaving her stateless.

Which actress did Otto Frank ask to play Anne in the 1959 film of the diary?

Audrey Hepburn: she declined, feeling too old for the part, though like Anne she had spent her adolescence under the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

What did Otto Frank's first company in Amsterdam sell?

Pectin, a fruit extract: it helps jam set, and in 1942 the family went into hiding in the annex behind the company's own offices.

What was the name of Anne's older sister?

Margot kept a diary of her own, Anne wrote, but unlike Anne's, it has never been found.

What kind of education did Anne receive from 1934 at an institution later renamed in her honour?

Montessori lessons ended for Anne in 1941, when the Nazi occupiers forced Jewish pupils out into separate Jewish schools.

What destroyed Otto Frank's US visa paperwork in May 1940?

The Rotterdam consulate was bombed on 14 May 1940 and all papers were lost; Otto kept trying, but his bid for a Cuban visa was cancelled in December 1941.

The only known film footage of Anne shows her doing what?

Watching a neighbour's wedding from a window, she leans out for a better look at the bride and groom; the couple later shared the film with the Anne Frank House.

What occasion brought Anne Frank her red-and-white checkered diary?

Her thirteenth birthday brought it on 12 June 1942, and less than a month later Anne took it with her into hiding.

Which imaginary friend did Anne Frank address her diary letters to?

Kitty began as one of several imaginary friends Anne wrote letters to, and in time she wrote to Kitty alone.

What forced the Franks into hiding ten days earlier than planned, on 6 July 1942?

A call-up for Anne's sister came on 5 July; next morning the 16-year-old cycled to the hiding place while Anne and her parents walked.

Which toys did Anne ask neighbour Toosje Kupers to keep, fearing they might fall into the wrong hands?

Her marbles went to Kupers along with a tea set and a book, and the Kupers also took in the family's cat, Moortje.

On which canal was the building containing the Secret Annex?

Prinsengracht held Otto Frank's business, so the hiding place lay behind offices where his most trusted employees went on working.

What concealed the door to the Secret Annex?

A bookcase hid the entrance, yet police searching the building in August 1944 still found the door behind it.

Which country did the Franks pretend they had fled to when they went into hiding?

Switzerland was a plausible story, since Otto Frank had family living there.

What did Fritz Pfeffer do with his young son after Kristallnacht, before fleeing to the Netherlands himself?

Sent him to England, where the boy was raised by an uncle, survived the war and later emigrated to the United States.

What did Edith Frank pass through a hole in a wall to her daughters at Auschwitz?

Extra food went to the girls through that hole; soon separated from them, Edith stayed in Auschwitz and died there in January 1945.

What was the profession of Fritz Pfeffer, the eighth person to join the annex in November 1942?

Dentist Fritz Pfeffer was barred by Nazi race laws from marrying his Catholic partner, Charlotte; after the war their marriage was recognised posthumously.

From whom did Anne receive her first kiss in the annex?

Peter van Pels was at first dismissed by Anne as a shy, gawky youth, yet the two fell in love in the annex.

Which of the helpers did Otto Frank say was Anne's closest friend?

Bep Voskuijl signed up for a Latin correspondence course in her own name so that Anne's sister could secretly take it.

What career did Anne say she wanted in her diary entry of 5 April 1944?

Journalist was her ambition by 1944, though in October 1942 she had still dreamed of becoming a Hollywood film star.

What did Anne do after an exiled minister's March 1944 radio appeal?

Began rewriting her diary, once minister Gerrit Bolkestein had urged listeners to keep diaries and letters as a record of the occupation.

What did helper Victor Kugler do on a 1945 prisoner march?

He escaped in an air raid, got help from strangers for a few days, then went home and hid in his own house.

Which SS sergeant led the police raid on the Secret Annex?

Karl Silberbauer was found in 1963 serving in the Vienna police; he was suspended but never prosecuted.

To which transit camp were the eight prisoners sent after their arrest?

Westerbork put them in its Punishment Barracks, because Jews caught in hiding were treated as criminals.

Why were Anne's diary papers left on the annex floor after the arrest?

An officer emptied a briefcase for loot, tipping the papers out; helpers later gathered them up and kept them in a desk drawer.

What alternative to betrayal did the Anne Frank House's 2016 research suggest for the raid?

An investigation into ration-card fraud fits the raiders' usual work on financial crimes, and two salesmen linked to the building had been arrested over coupons.

What did Ambo Anthos do with its 2022 book naming a Jewish notary as Anne Frank's betrayer?

Ambo Anthos recalled it from shops after historians disputed that the Jewish Council ever held a list of hiding places the notary could draw on.

What was notable about the 3 September 1944 train that took the annex group east from the transit camp?

Of its 1,019 passengers, 549 were gassed on arrival, including every child under 15.

Why was Anne Frank moved into a separate barracks at Auschwitz?

She had scabies, and her sister caught it too, so both girls were isolated in the sick barracks, away from their mother.

To which camp were Anne and her sister moved from Auschwitz in the autumn of 1944?

Bergen-Belsen first put the new arrivals in tents, which storms wrecked, so the women were crammed into barracks.

Which childhood friend spoke to Anne through a barbed-wire fence at the camp in early 1945?

Hanneli Goslar could not see Anne through the straw-stuffed fence; she threw over a food parcel, another prisoner grabbed it, and a second got through.

From what disease is Anne believed to have died?

Typhus spread as the camp grew overcrowded and filthy, and both sisters caught it that winter.

Where were Anne Frank and her sister buried?

In a mass grave, hastily and anonymously, so the sisters' stone at the camp today is only a symbolic memorial.

Which army liberated the camp where Anne Frank died?

The British Army freed the camp on 15 April 1945, weeks after the sisters had died there, perhaps as early as February.

Which actress won an Oscar for her role in the 1959 film The Diary of Anne Frank?

Shelley Winters won Best Supporting Actress, and in 1975 she gave the statuette to the Anne Frank House.

What was the original title under which the diary was first published in 1947?

Het Achterhuis, meaning 'the back house', was the title Anne herself had chosen for the book she hoped to publish.

What did historian Jan Romein's 1946 column about the diary lead to?

Publishers' interest followed, and the Amsterdam publisher Contact brought the diary out as a book the next year.

Why was helper Johannes Kleiman freed from a Nazi camp?

His poor health won his release; after the war he helped set up the Anne Frank House foundation, but he died in 1959, before the museum opened.

What did a textile firm plan for the Secret Annex building before campaigners saved it?

The firm meant to demolish it for a factory, but public pressure won, and the rescued building opened as a museum in 1960.

Which award did Goodrich and Hackett's 1955 Broadway play based on the diary win?

The 1959 film followed; biographer Melissa Müller thought the dramatisation romanticised and sentimentalised Anne's story.

What did Anne criticise in diary passages Otto cut?

Her parents' marriage was the target; Otto still printed some of Anne's harsh words about her mother but left this passage out.

Which pen name does the second family in the annex go by in the published diary?

Van Daan is the name readers know them by; Otto Frank used his own family's real names but kept pseudonyms for the others in hiding.

Who wrote the introduction to the first American edition of Anne Frank's diary?

Kennedy said in 1961 that 'no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank'.

Which statesman said in 1994 that reading Anne's diary in prison gave him 'much encouragement'?

Nelson Mandela likened her fight against Nazism to his own struggle against apartheid.

What did Anne use to cover two pages of her first diary?

Brown paper hid a few 'dirty' jokes and notes on sex until new imaging let researchers read the pages in 2018.

What kind of tree was the 'Anne Frank tree', visible from the annex, which was blown down in 2010?

A horse-chestnut, it had been propped up by a steel frame after disease struck, but the gale brought down tree and support together.

Which Doubleday editor, later Julia Child's, rescued Anne Frank's diary from a pile of rejected manuscripts?

Judith Jones, working in Paris, read the French edition and persuaded her bosses, and Doubleday published it in the US in 1952.

Where did Anne find the name of her diary's imaginary friend?

In a girls' book series by Cissy van Marxveldt, which is why several of Anne's imaginary pen friends share names with its characters.

Otto Frank's second company, founded in 1938, wholesaled which goods?

Herbs and spices for sausage-making were its trade, and when Jews were barred from running businesses, Otto kept his firms out of Nazi hands through his employees.

In which square did the Frank family live before going into hiding?

Merwedeplein was where Edith Frank found the family a flat while her husband set up his business.

In which city is the Anne Frank Fonds, set up by Otto Frank in 1963, headquartered?

Basel became Otto Frank's home after he left the Netherlands, and he made the Fonds his sole heir, so it holds the rights to Anne's writings.

Where was the first sapling from the fallen Anne Frank tree planted, in April 2013?

The Children's Museum of Indianapolis planted the first, grown from the seed of a tree a court had once saved from being cut down.

In 2009 UNESCO added Anne Frank's diary to which international register?

Memory of the World lists the notebooks, which Otto Frank left in his will to the Dutch state's war documentation institute, NIOD.

What did writer Meyer Levin do after Otto Frank rejected his script of the diary?

He sued, and years later he told his side of the feud in a book titled The Obsession.

Roughly how many visitors a year did the Anne Frank House draw in the late 2010s?

1.2 million visitors a year walk through rooms the Nazis had emptied after the arrest, which are still left unfurnished.

Which pop singer sparked an outcry in 2013 with the message he left in the Anne Frank House guestbook?

Justin Bieber, then 19, wrote that he hoped Anne would have been a fan of his, and the museum ended up defending him against the backlash.

In which country did Anne Frank's diary sell more than 100,000 copies in its first edition during the 1950s?

Japan gave the diary its most striking early success, even as the first UK edition went out of print by 1953.

Which future Oscar winner played Anne Frank in the 1997 Broadway revival of The Diary of Anne Frank?

Natalie Portman led a version revised by Wendy Kesselman and directed by James Lapine, which earned a Tony nomination for Best Revival of a Play.

The married couple who dramatised Anne Frank's diary for Broadway also co-wrote which 1940s Christmas classic?

It's a Wonderful Life was one of many Hollywood screenplays by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who also wrote The Thin Man and Easter Parade.

Anne Frank lived in Amsterdam from the age of four, but what was her legal status when she died?

A stateless person is what she became in 1941, when Nazi Germany stripped Jews living abroad of their citizenship, and she never became a Dutch national.

For roughly how long did Anne Frank and seven others stay hidden in the Secret Annex before their arrest?

About 2 years: the museum counts 761 days between the Franks' arrival in July 1942 and the arrests of August 1944.

What were Jews in the occupied Netherlands, including Anne Frank, forced to wear on their clothes from May 1942?

A yellow star with the word for 'Jew' printed in the middle became compulsory on 3 May 1942, two months before the Franks went into hiding.

Where did helper Miep Gies keep Anne Frank's rescued diary, unread, until the end of the war?

In her desk drawer is where it stayed, because Miep Gies refused to read it; she later said she would have had to destroy it for the names it contained.

At which New York department store did Otto Frank, who later published Anne Frank's diary, work as a young man?

Macy's gave him a work placement around 1909 thanks to a college friend, Nathan Straus Jr., years before he joined the family bank back home.

What did Anne Frank paste on the walls of her cramped room in the Secret Annex to brighten it up?

Pictures of movie stars went up beside landscapes, works of art and members of the royal family, in years when cinemas were closed to Jews.

Which Oscar-winning actor played Otto Frank in the 2001 television miniseries Anne Frank: The Whole Story?

Ben Kingsley earned Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for the part, in a two-part production based on Melissa Müller's 1998 biography.

Which English novelist did Otto Frank read, dictionary at hand, during silent mornings in Anne Frank's Secret Annex?

Charles Dickens was his way of improving his English, and the book was put away each day once the office helpers arrived and breakfast could begin.

What did Otto Frank track with marks on a wall of the Secret Annex during Anne Frank's stay there?

How much she grew was 13 centimetres by the end of her stay, which left her with clothes that no longer fitted.

Which Nazi hunter set out to trace the policeman who arrested Anne Frank after deniers claimed she never existed?

Simon Wiesenthal took up the search in 1958 after deniers dared him to prove she had existed, and in 1963 the man was exposed as a serving Vienna police inspector.

Anne Frank's cousin Buddy Elias, who later led the Anne Frank Fonds, toured the world for years as what?

An ice skater with Holiday on Ice from 1947, he was the show's lead comedian for more than fourteen years before turning to acting.

Which Auschwitz survivor became Anne Frank's stepsister when her widowed mother married Otto Frank in 1953?

Eva Schloss had lived across the same Amsterdam square as the Franks, and she went on to co-found the Anne Frank Trust UK.

To which country did Victor Kugler, one of Anne Frank's helpers, emigrate in 1955 after his wife died?

Canada became his home, and in 1958 he appeared on the American TV panel show To Tell the Truth as the man who had hidden the Franks.

Miep Gies, who helped hide Anne Frank, was sent to the Netherlands as an undernourished child from which country?

Austria was gripped by shortages after the First World War, so in 1920 the 11-year-old was fostered by a family in Leiden, who gave her the nickname Miep.

Which director of the 1959 film The Diary of Anne Frank had filmed the newly liberated Dachau camp in 1945?

George Stevens led the Signal Corps unit that filmed D-Day and Dachau, and footage he compiled was presented as evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

Which magazine named Anne Frank among its 100 most important people of the twentieth century in 1999?

Time placed her among its Heroes & Icons, with an essay by Roger Rosenblatt arguing that her lasting fame rests on how well she wrote.

Which teenage actress, daughter of a famous Method acting coach, created the role of Anne Frank on Broadway in 1955?

Susan Strasberg earned a Tony nomination for the part, yet the 1959 screen role went to Millie Perkins, a cover model who had never acted on camera.

Which pen name did Anne Frank give Fritz Pfeffer, the man who shared her narrow room in the Secret Annex?

Dussel was her name for him, and his partner Charlotte Kaletta was so hurt by the unflattering portrait that she cut all ties with Otto Frank.

Which Amsterdam church, whose tower clock Anne Frank could see from her hiding place, stands near the Secret Annex?

The Westerkerk, burial place of Rembrandt, has a carillon whose chiming Anne described as a comfort during her months indoors.

The checkered notebook that Anne Frank turned into her first diary had actually been sold as what?

An autograph book with a little lock on the front, it was no surprise gift: her parents had let her pick it out herself in a bookshop.

What did Anne Frank and her roommate Fritz Pfeffer quarrel over until Otto Frank stepped in to mediate?

The writing table was the prize: he thought his Spanish studies mattered more than a teenager's scribbling, and he gave way only grudgingly.

Which luxury did helper Miep Gies manage to buy for a delighted Anne Frank in the summer of 1943?

Red high-heeled shoes in suede cost a considerable sum, bought when Anne had nothing left to wear but a pair of clumsy ski boots.

What did Otto Frank mark with pins on a newspaper map on the wall of Anne Frank's Secret Annex in June 1944?

The Allied advance through Normandy was pinned up day by day on a map he cut from De Telegraaf two days after the landings.

Why could the toilet in Anne Frank's Secret Annex not be flushed between 8:30 and 9:00 on weekday mornings?

Warehouse men would hear the pipes, which ran straight through their workplace, and they were never told that anyone was living upstairs.

What did the Anne Frank Fonds stand to prolong when it named Otto Frank as the diary's co-author in 2015?

Copyright protection on the 1947 text was due to lapse on 1 January 2016, seventy years after her death, but a co-author who died in 1980 would delay that for decades.

Which 2023 television series tells the story of Miep Gies, the secretary who helped to hide Anne Frank?

A Small Light features Bel Powley as Miep and Liev Schreiber as Otto Frank, and it premiered on National Geographic before reaching Disney+.

Which part of the Secret Annex was the only place where Anne Frank could be alone and look outside?

The attic gave her the one view she could safely enjoy, and the room doubled as a pantry for potatoes, beans and drying laundry.

Which foreign broadcaster's news did the people hiding with Anne Frank switch on each day at one o'clock?

The BBC bulletin came on just before lunch, a meal several of the helpers came upstairs to share, bringing news from the city with them.

Which Israeli institution honoured Miep Gies and Victor Kugler, helpers of Anne Frank, as Righteous Among the Nations?

Yad Vashem planted a tree for Kugler on its Boulevard of the Righteous, its tribute to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews.

What was the name of the cat Anne Frank had to leave behind when her family slipped into hiding in 1942?

Moortje was to be taken in by the neighbours, as a note the family left behind asked, while the annex cat, Mouschi, belonged to the teenage boy upstairs.

In which German city did four-year-old Anne Frank stay with her grandmother while the family moved to Amsterdam?

Aachen was her mother Edith's home town, and Anne stayed on there until February 1934, the last of the family to reach Amsterdam.

What purpose was given to Anne Frank's former family flat in Amsterdam when it reopened after restoration in 2005?

A refuge for writers who cannot work freely in their own countries, it was returned to its 1930s look with the help of family photographs and Anne's letters.

Which actor played Otto Frank both on Broadway in 1955 and in the 1959 film The Diary of Anne Frank?

Joseph Schildkraut repeated his stage role on screen, as did Gusti Huber and Lou Jacobi from the original Broadway cast.

Which actress read extracts from the diary in the Oscar-winning 1995 documentary Anne Frank Remembered?

Glenn Close voiced the diary while Kenneth Branagh narrated, and the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1996.

Which day of the week did Anne Frank find the most miserable in the Secret Annex, a day of scrubbing and washing?

Sunday ran to a different rhythm: breakfast waited until 11:30, then came hours of cleaning and a long afternoon nap.

Which exiled queen addressed the occupied Netherlands of Anne Frank's day over Radio Oranje?

Wilhelmina had reached London in May 1940, days after the invasion, and spoke to her people over the airwaves from there.