The Secret Annexe: from The Diary of Anne Frank: Pocket Penguins - Tapa blanda

In May 2005 Penguin will publish 70 unique titles to celebrate the company's 70th birthday. The titles in the Pocket Penguins series are emblematic of the renowned breadth of quality of the Penguin list and will hark back to Penguin founder Allen Lane's vision of 'good books for all'.

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. This extract from the Definitive Edition of Anne's diary begins on Tuesday 10 November 1942.

Anne Frank was born on 12 June 1929. She died in Bergen-Belsen, three months short of her sixteenth birthday.

Otto H. Frank was the only member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. He died in 1980.

Mirjam Pressler is a writer of books for young readers and a well-known translator. She lives in Germany.

The translator, Susan Massotty, lives in Holland.