For her thirteenth birthday Anne Frank received a diary as a present from her father.

She kept it from 12 June 1942 to 1 August 1944. In this diary, which she addressed to an imaginary friend called Kitty, Anne wrote about her life - first in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and then, when the Nazi persecution of Jews forced her family into hiding, in the sealed-off back rooms of an Amsterdam office building, which they referred to as the 'Secret Annexe'.

Anne had always dreamed of being a writer and hoped one day to publish her diary.