All us know of Anne Frank, but who was she, really?

Everyone knows her photo. For some it shows the cheeky smile of a young girl, “Miss Quack Quack”. For others, the image represents an enigmatic veil of mystery, similar to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Millions have read her diary, watched various renditions in theatres and on the screen, or visited exhibitions devoted to her story. Thousands queue in front of the house in Amsterdam, where she spent 760 days in the secret annex, hiding from the Gestapo and their Dutch collaborators.

People quote the most famous sentence from her diary, immortalised in the Hollywood film, saying that “in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart”.

The sentence was written in July 1944 by 15-year-old Jewish girl Anne Frank, three weeks before the capture of her family by the Nazis. It represents the innocence, perhaps naivety of an adolescent, who after the war became one of the most iconic symbols of the Nazi Holocaust.

The quote carries a universal message that goodwill eventually prevails. This has turned Anne’s legacy into an easily adoptable trope, serving activists and political agendas. But who, actually, was Anne Frank? And how did she differ from the “Anne Franks” that have emerged since the end of the war?

Acclaimed author Ruth Franklin explores...

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