THE FOLIO SOCIETY

'I don't want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death!'

For more than two years, the Franks and another Jewish family lived like ghosts in a cramped set of rooms at the back of an office building in Amsterdam. The diary Anne Frank kept of her time in hiding still captivates the world.

A 'great source of comfort and support', Anne's diary was her closest friend and only true confidant; in which she mused on life, love, books, the trials of adolescence and her ambitions to become a writer. She documents the stresses and strains of close confinement in the Secret Annexe - how the daylight hours were passed in near-silence, behind closed curtains and usually without running water; how in the relative freedom of the evenings their company would huddle around the wireless for news of the war, take baths, and receive visits from trusted 'helpers' who supplied them with food, clothes and information. Anne is at times as precocious and self-absorbed as any ordinary teenager - 'Mother's grumbling at me again . . . what do I care!' - at others frighteningly perceptive about the perils of her family's situation - 'Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes.' They too were finally discovered by the Nazis. Anne Frank died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, a few months shy of her 16th birthday and of the end of World War II.

For its spirit of youth and humanity, for its heartbreaking optimism, for the way it symbolises the tragedy of millions, The Diary of a Young Girl is one of the most powerful and poignant books of the 20th century.