In The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank and her family were hiding from the Nazis. They went into hiding in Amsterdam in July 1942 to escape Nazi persecution of Jews in the German-occupied Netherlands.
The Frank family—Otto, Edith, Margot, and Anne—lived in a concealed rear section of Otto Frank's former business premises, later known as the Secret Annex. Four other Jewish people joined them there: Hermann and Auguste van Pels, their son Peter, and Fritz Pfeffer. Several non-Jewish helpers risked arrest to bring food, supplies, and news.
Anne received her diary on her 13th birthday, June 12, 1942, and wrote in it during the two years in hiding. The group was discovered and arrested on August 4, 1944. A common simplification is to say they hid from “the Germans”; the more precise answer is the Nazi regime and its persecution of Jews, enforced in the Netherlands by German occupation authorities and collaborators.