When Otto Frank read his daughter’s diary for the first time after her death in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, he discovered something new about Anne. “Every parent should realize that it is not possible to entirely know your children,” he described in an interview in 1979. This is a surprising observation, considering that the Frank family, along with four other people, lived together 24-hours per day, for more than two years when they hid from the Nazis during World War II. Not only were they each other’s only companions, they lived in a tiny attic space about the size of a one-car garage above Otto Frank’s factory. Workers making pectin (a substance used for making jelly) continued to work on the floors beneath them requiring the fugitives above to be completely silent during work hours. Only a select few who worked below knew about the secreted inhabitants. Anne was thirteen when she, her older sister, and her parents went into hiding from the Nazis who occupied Amsterdam, but she already aspired to be a writer. Initially, the red-plaid fabric covered diary she kept while hidden was the continuation of a writing routine. She started recording her thoughts and observations on her thirteenth birthday in June 1942, unaware that within one month she would climb three, steep flights of stairs to a space where she would enter isolation with her family from the rest of Amsterdam for more than two years. When Anne began her diary she wrote, “Writing in a diary is a really strange […]