Anne Frank was incapable of writing a diary.
Anne Frank . One of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust , she gained fame posthumously following the publication of The Diary of a Young Girl ( originally Het Achterhuis ; The Secret Annex ) , in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944 , during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II . From then until the family 's arrest by the Gestapo in August 1944 , Anne kept a diary she had received as a birthday present , and wrote in it regularly . Frank 's father , Otto , the only survivor of the family , returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that her diary had been saved by one of the helpers , Miep Gies , and his efforts led to its publication in 1947 . It was translated from its original Dutch version and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl , and has since been translated into over 60 languages . The Diary of a Young Girl ( also known as The Diary of Anne Frank ) is a book of the writings from the Dutch language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands .