For people all over the world, Anne Frank, the vivacious, intelligent Jewish girl with a crooked smile and huge dark eyes, has become the "human face of the Holocaust." Her diary of twenty-five months in hiding, a precious record of her struggle to keep hope alive through the darkest days of this century, has touched the hearts of millions. Here, after five decades, is the first biography of this remarkable figure. Drawing on exclusive interviews with family and friends, on previously unavailable correspondence, and on documents long kept secrets, Melissa Müller creates a nuanced portrait of her famous subject. This is the flesh-and-blood Anne Frank, unsentimentalized and therefore all the more affecting - Anne Frank restored to history. Müller traces Anne's life from her idyllic childhood in an assimilated family, long established in Frankfurt banking circles, to her passionate adolescence in German-occupied Amsterdam and her desperate end in Bergen-Belsen at the age of sixteen. Full of revelations, this richly textured biography casts new light on Anne's relations with her mother, whom she treats harshly in the diary, and solves an enduring mystery: who betrayed the families hiding in the annex just when liberation was at hand? This is an indispensable volume for all those who seek a deeper, richer understanding of Anne Frank and the brutal times in which she lived and died. -- from dust jacket.