Anne Frank wrote her famous diary entries while she and her family were in hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex behind her father’s business in Amsterdam during World War II.

When and where she wrote the diary

  • Anne received her diary as a present for her thirteenth birthday on 12 June 1942, in Amsterdam.
  • Less than a month later, in July 1942, the Frank family went into hiding in a concealed apartment (the “Secret Annex”) at 263 Prinsengracht, above Otto Frank’s company offices.
  • She continued writing there for over two years, documenting daily life, fear of discovery, and tensions among the eight people sharing the cramped space.

Why the diary became “famous”

  • Anne initially wrote for herself and addressed many entries to an imaginary friend she named Kitty , treating the diary as a confidant rather than a simple record of events.
  • In 1944 she heard a radio broadcast calling on Dutch citizens to preserve their wartime experiences, which inspired her to revise her diary with future readers in mind and to plan a book titled “Het Achterhuis” (“The Secret Annex”).
  • After the family’s arrest in August 1944 and Anne’s death in the Holocaust, her father Otto Frank, the only immediate family member to survive, arranged for the diary’s publication as “The Diary of a Young Girl,” which later became one of the world’s most widely read accounts of the Holocaust.

So the phrase “Anne Frank wrote her famous diary entries in t…” is completed by the idea that she wrote them in hiding, in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.