Anne Frank House to showcase Frank family archive

Sixtieth anniversary release of diary

AMSTERDAM - Relatives of Holocaust victim and famed teenage diarist Anne Frank will loan a collection of photographs and letters to the Anne Frank House museum, in a gesture to mark the 60th anniversary of the publication of her diary. The museum contains the actual rooms that were the Jewish girl's hiding place during World War II.

The material, which comes from the Anne Frank Fonds archive in Basel, Switzerland, and from Anne's cousin Buddy Elias, includes photographs of Anne, her sister Margot, her mother Edith and her father Otto that have rarely or never been on public display before.

Much of the material has been recently catalogued for the first time. Anne Frank wrote her diary while she and her family hid in a tiny annex to an Amsterdam warehouse for 25 months while the Nazi occupiers of the Netherlands were aggressively tracing unaccounted for Jews.

The family was betrayed and arrested in August 1944. Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15 in March 1945, just weeks away from the Liberation by Allied troops. Her father Otto Frank, the family's only survivor of the death camps, recovered the diary after the war and published it in Dutch in June 1947 as "Het Achterhuis," or The Annex.

The book was translated into German, French and then English in 1952 as "The Diary of a Young Girl," which later became "The Diary of Anne Frank."

It has since been translated into dozens of other languages and is the most widely read book on the Holocaust, making its author a symbol of all the victims of the Nazi era.