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(Anne Frank Fonds/Anne Frank House via Getty Images)

“The snapshot … adds a fascinating footnote to the Anne Frank legend. LIFE photographer Paul Schutzer found it when he was thumbing through a family album in the home of Maryland friends. “One familiar face caught my eye,” he recalls, “and I realized it was Anne Frank.””

Here, on the anniversary of the July day in 1942 when the Frank family went into hiding, LIFE commemorates Anne’s unconquerable spirit — and bears witness to the suffering unleashed by the Third Reich — through the story of one seemingly incongruous photograph: a picture of children playing in a sandbox in Amsterdam in 1937.