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Before going into hiding
For her thirteenth birthday, Frank received an autograph book, bound with red-and-white checkered cloth and with a small lock on the front. Frank decided she would use it as a diary, and she began writing in it almost immediately. In her entry dated 20 June 1942, she lists many of the restrictions placed upon the lives of the Dutch Jewish population.
In the summer of 1942, the systematic deportation of Jews from the Netherlands started. Otto and Edith Frank planned to go into hiding with the children on 16 July 1942, but when Margot received a call-up notice from the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung on 5 July, ordering her to report for relocation to a work camp, they were forced to move the plan ten days forward. Shortly before going into hiding, Anne gave her friend and neighbor Toosje Kupers a book, a tea set, and a tin of marbles. On 6 July, the Frank family left a note for the Kupers, asking them to take care of their cat Moortje. As the Associated Press reports: 'I'm worried about my marbles, because I'm scared they might fall into the wrong hands,' Kupers said Anne told her. 'Could you keep them for me for a little while?'
Life in the Achterhuis
On the morning of Monday, 6 July 1942, the Frank family moved into their hiding place, a three-story space entered from a landing above the Opekta offices on the Prinsengracht, where some of Otto Frank's most trusted employees would be their helpers. This hiding place became known as the Achterhuis. Their apartment was left in a state of disarray to create the impression that they had left suddenly, and Otto left a note that hinted they were going to Switzerland. The need for secrecy forced them to leave behind Anne's cat, Moortje. As Jews were not allowed to use public transport, Otto, Edith and Anne walked several kilometres from their home. Margot cycled to the Prinsengracht with Miep Gies. The door to the Achterhuis was later covered by a bookcase to ensure it remained undiscovered.
Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl were the only employees who knew of the people in hiding. Along with Gies' husband Jan Gies and Voskuijl's father Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl, they were the 'helpers' for the duration of their confinement. The only connection between the outside world and the occupants of the house, they kept the occupants informed of war news and political developments. They catered to all of their needs, ensured their safety, and supplied them with food, a task that grew more difficult with the passage of time. Frank wrote of their dedication and of their efforts to boost morale within the household during the most dangerous of times. All were aware that, if caught, they could face the death penalty for sheltering Jews.
On 13 July 1942, the Franks were joined by the Van Pels, made up of Hermann, Auguste, and 16-year-old Peter, and then in November by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and friend of the family. Frank wrote of her pleasure at having new people to talk to, but tensions quickly developed within the group forced to live in such confined conditions. After sharing her room with Pfeffer, she found him to be insufferable and resented his intrusion, and she clashed with Auguste van Pels, whom she regarded as foolish. She regarded Hermann van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer as selfish, particularly in regard to the amount of food they consumed. Some time later, after first dismissing the shy and awkward Peter van Pels, she recognized a kinship with him and the two entered a romance. She received her first kiss from him, but her infatuation with him began to wane as she questioned whether her feelings for him were genuine, or resulted from their shared confinement. Anne Frank formed a close bond with each of the helpers, and Otto Frank later recalled that she had anticipated their daily visits with impatient enthusiasm. He observed that Anne's closest friendship was with Bep Voskuijl, 'the young typist... the two of them often stood whispering in the corner.
The young diarist
In her writing, Frank examined her relationships with the members of her family, and the strong differences in each of their personalities. She considered herself to be closest emotionally to her father, who later commented, 'I got on better with Anne than with Margot, who was more attached to her mother. The reason for that may have been that Margot rarely showed her feelings and didn't need as much support because she didn't suffer from mood swings as much as Anne did.' The Frank sisters formed a closer relationship than had existed before they went into hiding, although Anne sometimes expressed jealousy towards Margot, particularly when members of the household criticized Anne for lacking Margot's gentle and placid nature. As Anne began to mature, the sisters were able to confide in each other. In her entry of 12 January 1944, Frank wrote, 'Margot's much nicer... She's not nearly so catty these days and is becoming a real friend. She no longer thinks of me as a little baby who doesn't count.
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Frank frequently wrote of her difficult relationship with her mother, and of her ambivalence towards her. On 7 November 1942 she described her 'contempt' for her mother and her inability to 'confront her with her carelessness, her sarcasm and her hard-heartedness,' before concluding, 'She's not a mother to me.' Later, as she revised her diary, Frank felt ashamed of her harsh attitude, writing: 'Anne, is it really you who mentioned hate, oh Anne, how could you?' She came to understand that their differences resulted from misunderstandings that were as much her fault as her mother's, and saw that she had added unnecessarily to her mother's suffering. With this realization, Frank began to treat her mother with a degree of tolerance and respect.
The Frank sisters each hoped to return to school as soon as they were able, and continued with their studies while in hiding. Margot took a course 'Elementary Latin' by correspondence in Bep Voskuijl's name and received high marks. Most of Anne's time was spent reading and studying, and she regularly wrote and edited her diary entries. In addition to providing a narrative of events as they occurred, she wrote about her feelings, beliefs, dreams and ambitions, subjects she felt she could not discuss with anyone. As her confidence in her writing grew, and as she began to mature, she wrote of more abstract subjects such as her belief in God, and how she defined human nature.
Frank aspired to become a journalist, writing in her diary on Wednesday, 5 April 1944:
I finally realized that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant, to get on in life, to become a journalist, because that's what I want! I know I can write..., but it remains to be seen whether I really have talent...
And if I don't have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. But I want to achieve more than that. I can't imagine living like Mother, Mrs. van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to!...
I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me!
When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that's a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?
She continued writing regularly until her last entry of 1 August 1944.
BACKGROUND
The Diary of a Young Girl
The diary is one of the most read stories in literature, fact or fiction. One has to wonder what Anne would have thought had she somehow known how her writing, her story, would affect the world and place her in a category of her own at the top of that list, forever. It would be difficult to over emphasize the importance of this diary, this literary gem.
Histories most important and popular diary of all time has also been praised for its literary merits. Commenting on Anne Frank's writing style, the dramatist Meyer Levin commended Anne Frank for 'sustaining the tension of a well-constructed novel', and was so impressed by the quality of her work that he collaborated with Otto Frank on a dramatization of the diary shortly after its publication. Levin became obsessed with Anne Frank, which he wrote about in his autobiography The Obsession. The poet John Berryman called the book a unique depiction, not merely of adolescence but of the 'conversion of a child into a person as it is happening in a precise, confident, economical style stunning in its honesty.
In her introduction to the diary's first American edition, Eleanor Roosevelt described it as 'one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read.' John F. Kennedy discussed Anne Frank in a 1961 speech, and said, 'Of all the multitudes who throughout history have spoken for human dignity in times of great suffering and loss, no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank.' In the same year, the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of her: 'one voice speaks for six million—the voice not of a sage or a poet but of an ordinary little girl.'
As Anne Frank's stature as both a writer and humanist has grown, she has been discussed specifically as a symbol of the Holocaust and more broadly as a representative of persecution. Hillary Clinton, in her acceptance speech for an Elie Wiesel Humanitarian Award in 1994, read from Anne Frank's diary and spoke of her 'awakening us to the folly of indifference and the terrible toll it takes on our young,' which Clinton related to contemporary events in Sarajevo, Somalia and Rwanda. After receiving a humanitarian award from the Anne Frank Foundation in 1994, Nelson Mandela addressed a crowd in Johannesburg, saying he had read Anne Frank's diary while in prison and 'derived much encouragement from it.' He likened her struggle against Nazism to his struggle against apartheid, drawing a parallel between the two philosophies: 'Because these beliefs are patently false, and because they were, and will always be, challenged by the likes of Anne Frank, they are bound to fail.' Also in 1994, Václav Havel said 'Anne Frank's legacy is very much alive and it can address us full'y in relation to the political and social changes occurring at the time in former Eastern Bloc countries.
Primo Levi suggested Anne Frank is frequently identified as a single representative of the millions of people who suffered and died as she did because 'One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.' In her closing message in Müller's biography of Anne Frank, Miep Gies expressed a similar thought, though she attempted to dispel what she felt was a growing misconception that 'Anne symbolises the six million victims of the Holocaust', writing: 'Anne's life and death were her own individual fate, an individual fate that happened six million times over. Anne cannot, and should not, stand for the many individuals whom the Nazis robbed of their lives... But her fate helps us grasp the immense loss the world suffered because of the Holocaust.'
Otto Frank spent the remainder of his life as custodian of his daughter's legacy, saying, 'It's a strange role. In the normal family relationship, it is the child of the famous parent who has the honour and the burden of continuing the task. In my case the role is reversed.' He recalled his publisher's explaining why he thought the diary has been so widely read, with the comment, 'he said that the diary encompasses so many areas of life that each reader can find something that moves him personall'y. Simon Wiesenthal expressed a similar sentiment when he said that the diary had raised more widespread awareness of the Holocaust than had been achieved during the Nuremberg Trials, because 'people identified with this child. This was the impact of the Holocaust, this was a family like my family, like your family and so you could understand this.'
In June 1999, Time magazine published a special edition titled 'Time 100: The Most Important People of the Centur'y. Anne Frank was selected as one of the 'Heroes & Icons', and the writer, Roger Rosenblatt, described her legacy with the comment, 'The passions the book ignites suggest that everyone owns Anne Frank, that she has risen above the Holocaust, Judaism, girlhood and even goodness and become a totemic figure of the modern world—the moral individual mind beset by the machinery of destruction, insisting on the right to live and question and hope for the future of human beings.' He notes that while her courage and pragmatism are admired, her ability to analyse herself and the quality of her writing are the key components of her appeal. He writes, 'The reason for her immortality was basically literary. She was an extraordinarily good writer, for any age, and the quality of her work seemed a direct result of a ruthlessly honest disposition.
Publication
In July 1945, after the sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, who were with Anne and Margot Frank in Bergen-Belsen, confirmed the deaths of the Frank sisters, Miep Gies gave Otto Frank the diary and a bundle of loose notes that she had saved in the hope of returning them to Anne. Otto Frank later commented that he had not realized Anne had kept such an accurate and well-written record of their time in hiding. In his memoir, he described the painful process of reading the diary, recognizing the events described and recalling that he had already heard some of the more amusing episodes read aloud by his daughter. He saw for the first time the more private side of his daughter and those sections of the diary she had not discussed with anyone, noting, 'For me it was a revelation... I had no idea of the depth of her thoughts and feelings... She had kept all these feelings to herself'. Moved by her repeated wish to be an author, he began to consider having it published.
Frank's diary began as a private expression of her thoughts; she wrote several times that she would never allow anyone to read it. She candidly described her life, her family and companions, and their situation, while beginning to recognize her ambition to write fiction for publication. In March 1944, she heard a radio broadcast by Gerrit Bolkestein—a member of the Dutch government in exile, based in London—who said that when the war ended, he would create a public record of the Dutch people's oppression under German occupation. He mentioned the publication of letters and diaries, and Frank decided to submit her work when the time came. She began editing her writing, removing some sections and rewriting others, with a view to publication. Her original notebook was supplemented by additional notebooks and loose-leaf sheets of paper. She created pseudonyms for the members of the household and the helpers. The van Pels family became Hermann, Petronella, and Peter van Daan, and Fritz Pfeffer became Albert Düssell. In this edited version, she addressed each entry to 'Kitty,' a fictional character in Cissy van Marxveldt's Joop ter Heul novels that Anne enjoyed reading. Otto Frank used her original diary, known as 'version A', and her edited version, known as 'version B', to produce the first version for publication. Although he restored the true identities of his own family, he retained all of the other pseudonyms.
Otto Frank gave the diary to the historian Annie Romein-Verschoor, who tried unsuccessfully to have it published. She then gave it to her husband Jan Romein, who wrote an article about it, titled 'Kinderstem', which was published in the newspaper Het Parool on 3 April 1946. He wrote that the diary 'stammered out in a child's voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence at Nuremberg put together.' His article attracted attention from publishers, and the diary was published in the Netherlands as Het Achterhuis in 1947, followed by five more printings by 1950.
It was first published in Germany and France in 1950, and after being rejected by several publishers, was first published in the United Kingdom in 1952. The first American edition, published in 1952 under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, was positively reviewed. The book was successful in France, Germany, and the United States, but in the United Kingdom it failed to attract an audience and by 1953 was out of print. Its most noteworthy success was in Japan, where it received critical acclaim and sold more than 100,000 copies in its first edition. In Japan, Anne Frank quickly was identified as an important cultural figure who represented the destruction of youth during the war.
A play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett based upon the diary premiered in New York City on 5 October 1955, and later won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was followed by the film The Diary of Anne Frank, which was a critical and commercial success. Biographer Melissa Müller later wrote that the dramatization had 'contributed greatly to the romanticizing, sentimentalizing and universalizing of Anne's story.' Over the years the popularity of the diary grew, and in many schools, particularly in the United States, it was included as part of the curriculum, introducing Anne Frank to new generations of readers.
In 2016, during an examination of Anne Frank's original red-checked diary, researchers at the Anne Frank House came across two pages that had been completely covered with adhesive brown paper.
While these pages had been encountered before, Frank's diary is reportedly only examined by its safe keepers once every decade or so. The difference, this time, was that advances in photo-imaging software made it possible to decipher the words beneath the brown paper without endangering the fragile document.
In May 2018, the Anne Frank House revealed the words of these hidden pages for the first time since its author scribbled them out, more than two months into a two-year hideaway from the Nazis in the secret annex behind her father's business in Amsterdam.
The pages contained 'dirty' jokes and 'sexual matters'
"I'll use this spoiled page to write down 'dirty' jokes," Frank began her entry dated September 28, 1942.
She proceeded to do just that: "Do you know why the German girls of the armed forces are in the Netherlands?" she wrote. "As a mattress for the soldiers."
For an encore: "A man comes home at night and notices that another man shared the bed with his wife that evening. He searches the whole house, and finally also looks in the bedroom closet. There is a totally naked man, and when that one man asked what the other was doing there, the man in the closet answered: 'You can believe it or not but I am waiting for the tram.'"
The entry also delved into matters of a changing body and sexual curiosity. At one point, Frank described how a girl her age is due for her first period, calling it "a sign that she is ripe to have relations with a man but one doesn't do that of course before one is married."
As for these relations, Frank had clearly given the topic some thought: "I sometimes imagine that someone might come to me and ask me to inform him about sexual matters," she mused, wondering, "How would I go about it?" She proceeded to depict what she imagined were the "rhythmical movements" involved, as well as the "internal medicament" used to prevent pregnancy.
Frank also revealed that she was well aware of grown-up topics like prostitution: "All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together," she wrote. "In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there."
Altogether, according to the Anne Frank House, the two pages were filled with "five crossed-out phrases, four dirty jokes and 33 lines about sex education and prostitution."
Each edition of the book revealed more explicit entries
It's unclear why Frank covered up these particular pages. Although the original 1947 publication of Het Achterhuis, culled from her diaries and her father's edits, became famous for its innocent addresses to "Kitty" and other imaginary figures, more explicit entries had surfaced with the release of expanded editions in 1986 and 1991.
These included stark explorations of her body: "Until I was 11 or 12, I didn't realize there was a second set of labia on the inside [of her vagina], though you couldn't see them," she wrote at one point. "What's even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris."
Frank also had harsh observations about her family, the hideout's co-inhabitants and the helpers who brought them supplies, which certainly would have sparked hurt feelings had they been discovered at the time. These included unsparing comments about her mother, "the old nanny goat," and her disgust at her father's "fondness for talking about farting and going to the lavatory."
Frank seemingly intended to preserve just about everything she wrote, even before she focused on a possible future publication upon hearing Dutch minister Gerrit Bolkestein's March 1944 radio announcement about the importance of documenting the atrocities of the Nazis.
Frank used her diary to express thoughts she was 'not comfortable with'
Regardless of Frank's reasons for covering the two pages, the revelation of its contents marked another step in the ongoing exploration and analysis of her prolific output while isolated from the outside world.
According to researcher Peter de Bruijn of the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, the newly discovered passages are important because they reveal Frank's development of her craft. "She starts with an imaginary person whom she is telling about sex, so she creates a kind of literary environment to write about a subject she's maybe not comfortable with," he explained.
Observed Anne Frank House Executive Director Ronald Leopold, more succinctly, "They bring us even closer to the girl and the writer Anne Frank."
Remarkably, it seemed there was more to be gleaned from documents that had been closely guarded and examined for decades, and potentially still more to learn about their author, more than 70 years after her young life was cut short in a concentration camp.
Today, her diary has made her world famous, but on a day in September 1944 she was just another name — a terrified teenager herded into a train of cattle cars with 1,018 other Jews, headed east to the concentration camps.
Anne, her sister Margot and their parents — who were not Dutch citizens but German refugees — were arrested in August 1944 with four other Jews hiding with them in the back of a canal-side warehouse. They were betrayed by an unknown informant.
Anne was 15 years old.
Since the English publication of "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" in 1952, and its subsequent reprintings as "The Diary of Anne Frank," millions of readers have felt intimately connected to the girl who matured in its pages from innocent childhood into her precocious, sometimes rebellious teens.
Historian Harry Paape says Anne and her sister Margot probably were moved from Auschwitz on Oct. 28 to Bergen-Belsen, which was not a death camp with gas chambers but a concentration camp where inmates often died of disease, hunger and exposure.
Survivor Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper said in an Oscar-winning 1995 documentary that she saw Anne in her last days, ailing and covered with lice. "Anne had thrown away her clothes and she came to us crying, wrapped only in her gray blanket," she said.
Anne and Margot Frank died during a typhus epidemic that swept through Bergen-Belsen from February to April 1945, killing an estimated 35,000 people. Teenager Anne Frank was one of them. Little did she know that her words written in that red and white diary would become world famous with millions of people would marvel knowing what she thought in the deepest recesses of her young mind.