When people picture Anne Frank, they see the famous photograph—a young girl with dark hair and thoughtful eyes, frozen in time. They know she hid from the Nazis and wrote a diary. But what did she actually do all day? What was it like to be thirteen, trapped in a hidden space behind a bookcase, knowing that a single cough at the wrong moment could get your entire family killed?
Every morning in the Secret Annex began with tension. Anne would wake around seven, sometimes earlier, in the tiny room she shared with Fritz Pfeffer, a middle-aged dentist who had joined the hiding group four months after the Franks went into hiding. Before she could stretch or yawn or do any of the normal things a teenager does upon waking, she had to remember where she was. She had to remember that the warehouse workers would arrive downstairs at eight, and that from that moment until they left in the evening, she would need to be almost completely silent.
The Annex was located in Amsterdam, hidden behind Otto Frank’s business at 263 Prinsengracht. A movable bookcase concealed the entrance. Behind it, eight people lived in roughly five hundred square feet of space for over two years. Anne’s family—her father Otto, her mother Edith, and her older sister Margot—occupied one room.
Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their teenage son Peter lived in another. Fritz Pfeffer shared Anne’s room. Eight people, three small rooms, one bathroom, and the constant knowledge that discovery meant death. But here’s something most people don’t realize about Anne’s mornings.
Before the workers arrived, there was a precious window of relative freedom. From about six-thirty to eight-thirty, the inhabitants could move around, use the bathroom without scheduling it, and speak in normal voices. Anne used this time to wash and dress. Washing was a creative endeavor.
There was no shower in the Annex. Bathing meant carrying a washbasin to wherever you could find privacy, which in such cramped quarters was almost nowhere. Anne wrote about taking her basin down to the office below, the only place with hot water, and bathing in front of the windows with the curtains drawn, always aware that someone might need to come through at any moment. The bathroom situation was a constant source of frustration and dark humor.
Eight people, one toilet, and limited flushing during the day because the noise might alert the workers below. Anne wrote extensively about the bathroom schedule, the arguments over who took too long, and the embarrassment of sharing such intimate logistics with people who had essentially been strangers when they first went into hiding. Imagine being a thirteen-year-old girl going through puberty, dealing with your first periods, and having to coordinate your most private moments with seven other people in a space smaller than most modern apartments. Anne wrote candidly about her body changing, about menstruation, about her curiosity regarding sex and reproduction.
These passages were edited out of early editions of the diary, deemed too inappropriate for young readers. But Anne herself felt these topics were important. She was becoming a woman in circumstances that allowed her no privacy, no guidance from peers, no normal adolescent experiences. The frankness with which she wrote about her body was an act of claiming ownership over the one thing the Nazis could not take from her—her own developing self.
Breakfast was simple but had to be carefully timed. Before eight-thirty, they could use the stove to make something warm. After the workers arrived, any cooking smells or sounds were too risky. Anne ate whatever was available.
Bread when they had it, porridge, sometimes leftovers from the night before. Food was always a concern. Everything had to be brought to them by their helpers—the brave Dutch employees of Otto Frank’s company who risked their lives every single day to keep eight people alive. These helpers were extraordinary people, and Anne knew it.
Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and Bep Voskuijl were not just bringing food. They were bringing hope, news of the outside world, and the simple human kindness that reminded the hidden families they had not been completely forgotten. Miep would shop for groceries using forged ration cards, always careful not to buy too much at any one store, always aware that a suspicious shopkeeper could doom everyone. She would arrive at the Annex during her lunch break, climbing the stairs behind the bookcase with bags full of whatever she could find—vegetables when available, sometimes a piece of meat, occasionally small treats that must have felt like treasures.
Miep Gies deserves special mention because her courage was almost incomprehensible. She was not Jewish. She had nothing to gain from helping the Franks and everything to lose. Harboring Jews was punishable by death or deportation to concentration camps.
Yet every single day for over two years, she walked into that building, climbed those stairs, and brought supplies to eight people whose survival depended on her. She celebrated holidays with them. She brought Anne books from the library. She listened to their fears and tried to bring them hope.
When the Annex was raided, she begged the Nazi officer to let the families go—an act that could have gotten her killed on the spot. He refused, but he also didn’t arrest her. A small mercy that haunted her for the rest of her long life. Bep Voskuijl was only twenty-three when the hiding began.
Not much older than a teenager herself, she became something of a companion to Anne and Margot, someone closer to their age who could understand their frustrations. It was Bep who enrolled in correspondence courses under false names so the girls could continue their education. It was Bep who listened to Anne’s dreams of becoming a writer and took them seriously. The bond between them was real, and Bep carried the weight of what happened in the Annex for the rest of her life.
Once eight-thirty arrived, everything changed. The warehouse workers were now downstairs, loading and unloading goods, going about their business with no idea that eight people were holding their breath just above them. Anne and the others had to move in stocking feet because the sound of shoes would carry through the old building’s thin floors. They could only whisper.
They couldn’t run water. They couldn’t use the toilet until they were absolutely certain the workers were occupied elsewhere. A cough had to be stifled. A sneeze could be a death sentence.
The need for silence was constant and terrifying. This is the part that’s hardest to truly comprehend. Imagine being told that for the next eight to ten hours, you essentially cannot exist. You cannot make noise.
You cannot be seen. You cannot leave. You are a ghost in your own life, haunting a small set of rooms while the real world goes on without you just a few feet away. Now imagine being a teenager full of energy and opinions and emotions and being told to contain all of that inside yourself day after day for over two years.
Anne struggled with this more than anyone. She was naturally vivacious, talkative, opinionated. Her teachers at school had often complained that she talked too much. Now she was expected to be silent for most of her waking hours.
The frustration was immense. She would write in her diary about feeling like she was going to explode, about needing to scream and not being able to, about the physical sensation of holding so much inside. Her body literally ached from the tension of constant suppression. So what did Anne do during those long silent hours?
She studied. This might seem surprising—she was in hiding, not in school—but Otto and Edith Frank were determined that their daughter’s education would continue. Anne had a rigorous schedule of subjects: Dutch, German, French, English, mathematics, history, geography, art history, and more. She worked through correspondence courses with Bep Voskuijl enrolling under false names to obtain the materials, and she took her studies seriously partly because she genuinely loved learning and partly because focusing on conjugating French verbs was infinitely better than focusing on the terror of their situation.
Her sister Margot was the academic star of the family, quiet and studious, always receiving praise for her diligence. Anne struggled more, especially with mathematics, which she despised. But she excelled at languages and history, and she threw herself into learning with the determination of someone who refused to let the Nazis take her future as well as her freedom. She dreamed of going to Paris after the war, of studying art history, of seeing the world.
Those dreams sustained her through the monotonous, terrifying days. The relationship between Anne and Margot was one of the more complex dynamics in the diary. Margot was three years older, beautiful, intelligent, and seemingly perfect. She never caused trouble, never talked back, never drew criticism from the adults.
Anne, by contrast, was constantly being told she was too loud, too opinionated, too much. She felt that her mother favored Margot, that everyone favored Margot, that she could never measure up to her perfect sister. But as the months in hiding wore on, the sisters grew closer. They began exchanging letters even though they lived in the same tiny space, sharing their deepest thoughts in writing because it was safer than speaking.
Margot confided that she too had feelings for Peter van Pels, but she stepped aside because she could see how much Anne needed that connection. It was an act of selfless love that Anne never forgot. And of course, there was the diary. Originally a gift for her thirteenth birthday just weeks before the family went into hiding, Anne named it Kitty and addressed her entries to this imaginary friend, pouring out her thoughts, fears, observations, and dreams.
She wrote about the petty arguments over food. She wrote about her complicated relationship with her mother. She wrote about falling in love with Peter van Pels, the shy boy living just upstairs. She wrote about the terror of air raids and the hope of Allied advances.
She wrote about becoming a woman and understanding herself in ways she never had before. But here is what makes Anne’s writing truly remarkable: she didn’t just keep a diary—she revised it. In early 1944, she heard a radio broadcast from the Dutch government in exile calling on people to preserve their diaries and letters as historical documents of the occupation. Anne realized that her diary could be more than a private record.
It could be a book. She began rewriting earlier entries, tightening the prose, developing the characters, shaping the narrative. She created pseudonyms for everyone. She was consciously crafting a work of literature, not just recording her days.
She also wrote short stories, fairy tales, and essays. She started a novel about a girl named Katie, though she never finished it. She wrote about her dreams of becoming a famous writer, of publishing her diary under the title The Secret Annex. The irony is devastating.
She achieved that dream beyond anything she could have imagined, but she never knew it. She never knew that her words would be translated into over seventy languages. That her face would become one of the most recognized in history. That the teenage girl who felt so misunderstood by the adults around her would be understood by millions.
Anne’s writing style evolved dramatically during her time in hiding. Early entries read like a typical teenage diary, chatty and gossipy. As the months passed, her writing deepened. She began exploring philosophical questions about human nature, about good and evil, about what it means to live an authentic life.
She developed a distinctive voice that was at once intimate and universal—specific to her situation, yet somehow speaking to anyone who has ever felt trapped, misunderstood, or afraid. Lunch in the Annex was often the main meal of the day, eaten around twelve-thirty when the helpers could sometimes join them. These were moments of precious normality. Adults talking, news being shared, problems being discussed.
Anne observed everything. She wrote about how the adults bickered over politics, how Mrs. van Pels flirted with Otto Frank, how her mother seemed to favor Margot, how everyone got on each other’s nerves in ways that would be amusing if they were not trapped together indefinitely. Her observations were sharp, sometimes cruel, in the way only a teenager’s observations can be.
She captured human nature under pressure with an eye that was both merciless and compassionate. The tensions between the inhabitants were constant and exhausting. Eight people with different personalities, different habits, different ways of coping with stress, all crammed together with no escape. The van Pelses argued loudly and often.
Mrs. van Pels could be vain and demanding. Mr. van Pels had opinions about everything and was not shy about sharing them.
Fritz Pfeffer was set in his ways and did not understand why a teenage girl needed time at the shared desk to write in her diary. Anne’s mother tried to keep the peace but often ended up in conflict with Anne herself. Only Otto Frank seemed to maintain his equilibrium, serving as mediator and peacekeeper, the calm center that kept the group from falling apart completely. Food was a constant preoccupation.
The helpers did their best, but rations were tight and options limited. Anne wrote about eating rotten vegetables, about the monotony of beans and cabbage, about the rare joy of something fresh or sweet. By 1944, the Netherlands was suffering severe shortages. Anne wrote about meals that consisted of little more than lettuce and rotten potatoes, about her stomach growling during the long silent hours, about dreaming of chocolate and strawberries.
She made lists of what she would eat after the war—elaborate menus of imagined feasts that helped distract from the gnawing reality of hunger. The afternoons stretched on. More studying, more writing, more waiting. Anne read voraciously—mythology, history, biography, anything she could get her hands on.
The helpers would bring books from the library, never checking out too many at once, always careful. Anne developed a passion for movie stars and royalty, cutting pictures from magazines and pasting them on her wall. These glamorous images were windows into a world she could no longer access, reminders that somewhere life was still colorful and full of possibility. Her walls became a collage of her interests and dreams—photographs of film stars, pictures of the Dutch and British royal families, reproductions of famous artworks.
These images are still there today, preserved in the Anne Frank House museum, faded but visible. Every picture was a small act of defiance, a refusal to let her world shrink to the size of the Annex. She also spent time looking out the window. This might sound simple, but it was not.
The Annex windows were covered with heavy curtains that could never be opened during the day because any movement, any shadow might be noticed from outside. But there was one window in the attic in Peter’s room where Anne could sometimes peek at a sliver of sky, at the top of a chestnut tree, at clouds moving overhead. She wrote about this tree with deep feeling. It was her connection to the natural world, her proof that beauty still existed.
In March 1944, she described looking at the sky and feeling that nature could bring her peace when nothing else could. That chestnut tree would outlive her by decades, finally falling in a storm in 2010. When the tree fell, it made international news. Saplings had already been cultivated from its chestnuts, and they were planted at schools, Holocaust memorials, and parks around the world.
There is something poetic about that. The tree that gave Anne a connection to nature now spreads across the globe—a living memorial to a girl who found hope in its branches. The relationship with Peter van Pels became a central focus of Anne’s last year in the Annex. He was three years older, quiet, not particularly impressive to Anne at first.
She had initially dismissed him as boring and unremarkable. But in the enclosed world of the hiding place, teenage attraction does not need much fuel. They began spending time together in the attic, talking, sitting close, eventually sharing their first kiss. Anne’s diary entries about Peter are tender, confused, and hopeful.
She wondered if what she felt was real love or just loneliness. She wondered if they had any future together. She never got to find out. Peter opened up to Anne in ways he had not with anyone else.
Anne found herself playing the role of confidante, even therapist, to this shy boy who had never learned to express his feelings. She was simultaneously falling in love with him and recognizing his limitations, seeing him clearly even as her heart clouded her judgment. It was a remarkably mature perspective for a fourteen-year-old, though Anne did not always feel mature. Sometimes she just wanted to be held.
The evenings brought some relief. After the warehouse workers left, usually around five-thirty or six, the inhabitants could move more freely, speak more loudly, and feel slightly more human. They would gather for dinner, another simple meal, and then listen to the radio. The BBC broadcasts were a lifeline, bringing news of the war’s progress, of Allied advances, of hope that the nightmare might someday end.
They followed the D-Day landings with desperate attention. They charted the liberation of Europe like their lives depended on it, because their lives did depend on it. But the radio also brought terror. Air raid sirens meant that everyone had to hope the bombs would not fall on them.
They couldn’t go to a shelter like normal people. They couldn’t do anything but wait and pray. The Allied bombing raids were a particular kind of torture. The inhabitants of the Annex wanted the Allies to win, needed them to win, but the bombs that were helping to defeat the Nazis could just as easily kill them.
The building would shake, the noise was deafening. Anne would lie in bed, eyes wide open in the darkness, listening to the planes and the explosions, wondering if this would be the night everything ended. The nights brought their own challenges. Anne shared her room with Fritz Pfeffer, an arrangement that pleased neither of them.
Pfeffer was fussy, set in his ways, and not particularly sympathetic to teenage moods. Anne found him insufferable and devoted considerable diary space to cataloging his annoying habits. But underneath the irritation was something deeper. Every night she had to sleep in a room with a relative stranger, a middle-aged man who snored, who took forever in the bathroom, and who did not understand her at all.
There was no privacy, no space that was truly her own. She wrote about insomnia, about lying awake worrying, about nightmares. She would think about her friends from school—where were they now? Had they been deported?
Were they dead? She thought about her grandmother, who had died just before the family went into hiding. She thought about the future, which seemed both impossibly far away and terrifyingly uncertain. Anne’s relationship with her mother was particularly painful during these years.
She felt that Edith did not understand her, that Edith favored Margot, that Edith was not the kind of mother she needed. Her diary entries about her mother are sometimes harsh, sometimes regretful, always complicated. In one particularly painful passage, Anne wrote that she could not love her mother because her mother did not know how to be a mother to her. Anne later went back and tried to soften some of her earlier entries, aware that she had been unfair.
She was growing up, developing empathy, understanding that everyone in that Annex was fighting their own invisible battles. Years later, Otto Frank struggled with whether to include those harsh passages in the published diary. They were painful to read, and he knew they would hurt his wife’s memory. But he also knew that removing them would be dishonest to who Anne was.
She was a real person, not a saint, and her complicated feelings were part of her truth. Her father was different. Otto Frank was Anne’s hero, her anchor, the parent she felt truly understood her. He helped with her studies, talked with her about ideas, treated her as an individual.
He was the calm at the center of the storm, the one who kept hope alive when everyone else was falling apart. Anne’s devotion to her father shines through every page of the diary. It was Otto who survived the war. Otto who found Anne’s diary scattered on the floor after the arrest.
And Otto who spent the rest of his life ensuring that his daughter’s words reached the world. The Annex had its small traditions and routines that made life bearable. They celebrated birthdays with whatever small gifts and treats could be scrounged. They marked holidays, Jewish and Dutch, trying to maintain some connection to normal life.
They told jokes, shared stories, played games. Anne’s wit and humor came out even in the darkest times. She could be funny, bitingly so, finding absurdity in their situation and refusing to let the Nazis take her spirit along with her freedom. Anne and her father wrote humorous poems for everyone’s gifts.
They played board games and card games during the evening hours. Anne understood their importance. She wrote about how laughter could save them when nothing else could, how finding joy in small things was itself an act of resistance. But there were also terrible moments.
Break-ins at the warehouse below sent everyone into paroxysms of terror. One night in April 1944, the inhabitants heard noises and were convinced they had been discovered. When Mr. van Pels went to investigate, he found himself face to face with intruders.
He shouted “Police! ” and they fled, but now the inhabitants were terrified that the burglars would report the strange shout, that the police would come to investigate, that everything would unravel. They spent the entire night in terror, not flushing the toilet, not moving, barely breathing. When morning came and nothing had happened, the relief was overwhelming.
But they knew they had come within inches of discovery. Anne wrote about the psychological toll of hiding in ways that still feel startlingly modern. She described mood swings, depression, anxiety, the feeling of being trapped inside her own head as well as inside the Annex. She wrote about having two selves.
The outer Anne was cheerful, flippant, and annoying. The inner Anne was serious, thoughtful, and yearning for something more. This dual identity was her way of protecting herself, of keeping her true self safe while presenting a surface that could handle criticism and conflict. Anne intuited this at fourteen without any training, without any guidance, simply by paying attention to her own mind.
The last entry in Anne’s diary is dated August 1, 1944. It’s a reflective piece about her personality, about the different sides of herself that she showed to the world. She writes about wanting to be better, about struggling with her own contradictions, about hoping that she might someday become the person she wanted to be. Three days later, on August 4, 1944, the Secret Annex was raided by the Nazi security service.
Someone had betrayed them. To this day, we don’t know who. Various theories have been proposed over the decades, but we may never know for certain who made that phone call. What we know is that around ten-thirty in the morning, a car pulled up to 263 Prinsengracht, and men with guns climbed the stairs behind the bookcase.
All eight inhabitants of the Annex were arrested. So were two of their helpers, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman. They were taken to a police station, then to a transit camp at Westerbork, then to Auschwitz on the very last transport to leave the Netherlands. On the train platform at Auschwitz, men were separated from women.
It was the last time Anne saw her father. Anne and Margot were later transferred to Bergen-Belsen, a camp that was not technically an extermination camp, but where tens of thousands died from disease, starvation, and neglect. In the winter of 1944 to 1945, a typhus epidemic swept through the camp. The conditions were beyond horrific.
Margot died first, falling from her bunk in her weakened state. Anne died a few days later in February or March 1945. She was fifteen years old. The British army liberated Bergen-Belsen just weeks after her death.
Of the eight people who hid in the Secret Annex, only Otto Frank survived. He was liberated from Auschwitz by Soviet forces in January 1945, and he spent months trying to find out what had happened to his family. He learned of his wife’s death first, then held out hope for his daughters. It was not until July 1945 that he received definitive word that Anne and Margot had died at Bergen-Belsen.
The man who had held his family together through two years of hiding was now completely alone. When he returned to Amsterdam, Miep gave him the diary she had saved from the floor of the Annex after the arrest, hoping to return it to Anne herself. Otto spent months reading his daughter’s words, discovering a girl he had lived with but had not fully known. He was devastated and amazed.
He decided the world should read what Anne had written. So what did Anne Frank actually do all day? She woke up in fear and went to sleep in fear. She studied languages she hoped to use in a future that might never come.
She wrote about her life, her thoughts, her dreams, her frustrations, her first love, her complicated family, and her desperate hope that somehow things would turn out okay. She looked at a chestnut tree through a crack in a curtain and found beauty in it. She drove her roommate crazy and fought with her mother and adored her father. She was funny and sharp and sometimes cruel and always achingly human.
She was a girl who refused to let her world shrink to the size of the Annex, and in doing so, she made it immeasurably larger.
