The Diary of a Young Girl, commonly referred to as The Diary of Anne Frank, is a book of the writings from the Dutch-language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Anne's diaries were retrieved by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Gies gave them to Anne's father, Otto Frank, the family's only survivor, just after the end of World War II in Europe.
The diary has since been published in more than 70 languages. It was first published under the title (; The Annex: Diary Notes 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944) by in Amsterdam in 1947. The diary received widespread critical and popular attention on the appearance of its English language translation, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Doubleday & Company (United States) and Vallentine Mitchell (United Kingdom) in 1952. Its popularity inspired the 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank by the screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which they adapted for the screen for the 1959 movie version. The book is included in several lists of the top books of the 20th century.
The copyright of the Dutch version of the diary, published in 1947, expired on 1 January 2016, seventy years after the author's death, as a result of a general rule in copyright law of the European Union. Following this, the original Dutch version was made available online.
Background
During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Anne Frank received a blank diary as one of her presents on 12 June 1942, her 13th birthday. According to the Anne Frank House, the red, checkered autograph book which Anne used as her diary was actually not a surprise, since she had chosen it the day before with her father when browsing a bookstore near her home. The main diary was written from 14 June.
On 5 July 1942, Anne's then-16-year-old sister, Margot, received an official summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany, and on 6 July, Margot and Anne went into hiding with their parents Otto and Edith. They were later joined by Hermann van Pels, Otto's business partner, his wife Auguste and their teenage son Peter. Their hiding place was in the sealed-off upper rooms of the annex at the back of Otto's company building in Amsterdam. Otto Frank started his business, named Opekta, in 1933. He was licensed to manufacture and sell pectin, a substance used to make jam. He stopped running his business while in hiding. But once he returned in the summer of 1945, he found his employees running it. The rooms that everyone hid in were concealed behind a movable bookcase in the same building as Opekta. Fritz Pfeffer, the dentist of their helper Miep Gies, joined them four months later. In the published version, names were changed: The van Pelses are known as the Van Daans, and Fritz Pfeffer as Albert Düssel. With the assistance of a group of Otto Frank's trusted colleagues, they remained hidden for two years and one month.
On 6 June 1944, the Allied forces commenced the Normandy landings, in France; the group was aware of this development, and hopeful for eventual liberation. On 4 August 1944, six weeks before the Allies breached the Belgian-Dutch border, the group was discovered and deported to Nazi concentration camps. They were long thought to have been betrayed, although there are indications that their discovery may have been accidental, that the police raid had actually targeted "ration fraud". Of the eight people, only Otto Frank survived the war. Anne was 15 years old when she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in Nazi Germany. The exact date of her death is unknown, and has long been believed to be in late February or early March, a few weeks before the concentration camp was liberated by British troops on 15 April 1945.
Format
Materially, the surviving manuscripts of Anne Frank's diary consist of three hardcover notebooks and up to 300 loose A5 sized pages, all written in grey, blue and black fountain pen ink. The notebooks include pasted-in photographs, letters and other paper ephemera collected by Anne Frank.
Entries in the first volume (a red-and-white checked autograph book) are dated between 12 June 1942 and 5 December 1942. Since the second surviving volume (a school exercise book) begins a year later on 22 December 1943 it is assumed that any volumes covering the intervening period have been lost, presumably after Anne Frank's arrest, when her hiding place was emptied on Nazi instructions. The third existing volume (another school exercise book) contains entries dated from 17 April 1944 to 1 August 1944, three days before her arrest. Anne Frank's selected transcription of her original diary entries, in which she clarifies and expands material, is written on loose sheets of carbon paper. These notebooks and loose sheets were recovered by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl in the few days between the family's arrest and before their rooms were emptied of all contents by a special department of the Amsterdam office of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, Nazi intelligence agency) for which many Dutch collaborators worked. In July 1945, once Anne Frank's death was confirmed by sisters Marianne and Rebekka Brilleslijper, who had known Anne and Margot Frank in Bergen-Belsen, Miep Gies gave all the found material to Otto Frank.
Initially, in her first notebook, Anne Frank writes her diary entries in a conventional form, as structured notes and self-referential articles to oneself. After two months, she begins to write in the form of letters to a group of imaginary friends. The names correspond with characters in a series of popular Dutch books by Cissy van Marxveldt, which Anne describes reading in the summer of 1942.
Anne's literary ambitions were galvanized on 29 March 1944 when she heard a London radio broadcast made by the exiled Dutch Minister for Education, Art, and Science, Gerrit Bolkestein, In her redraft, she standardizes entries by addressing all but the first few made in June 1942 to 'Kitty', expanding and clarifying situations, and excluding material she reconsidered as inconsequential, insignificant or too intimate for general consumption, and drafts a list of pseudonyms for those most frequently mentioned.
When the material came to be edited for its original publication in 1947, Otto Frank made a representative but discreet selection from Anne's notebooks and loose pages, using the pseudonyms to protect the privacy of living and dead individuals. After his death in 1980, all the material was transcribed and has been published, with the two drafts now being termed Version A (Anne Frank's original notebooks dated from 1942 to 1944) and Version B, her revised transcription made between May and August 1944.
Once the unabridged diaries were published in Dutch in 1986 and then in English in 1989, the context of 'Kitty' became evident. She is one of a group of eight imaginary recipients Anne collectively and individually addresses the first few months of her 1942 diary entries. There is no mention of Kitty Egyedi. With the exception of 'Kitty', none of the names come from Anne's real-life social circle. Three of the names may be Anne's creation, but five correspond to a group of friends in Cissy van Marxveldt's novels, which Anne and her friends were reading that summer. Significantly, the novels are epistolary and include a teenage girl called 'Kitty Francken'. By the end of 1942, Anne was writing solely to her. In 1943, when she started revising and expanding her diary entries, she standardised the form and consolidated all of the recipients to just Kitty.
Synopsis
Anne expressed the desire in the rewritten introduction of her diary for one person that she can call her truest friend – that is, a person to whom she could confide her deepest thoughts and feelings. She observes that she has had many "friends" and admirers, but (by her own definition) no true, dear friend with whom she could share her innermost thoughts. She originally thought her girl friend Jacque van Maarsen would be this person, but that was only partially successful. In an early diary passage, she remarks that she is not in love with Helmut "Hello" Silberberg, her suitor at that time, but considers that he might become a true friend. In hiding, she invests much time and effort into her budding romance with Peter van Pels, thinking he might evolve into that one, true friend, but that is eventually a disappointment to her in some ways, although she continues to care for him. Ultimately, it was only to Kitty that she entrusted her innermost thoughts.
Beyond her personal relationships and aspirations, Anne refers extensively to the persecution, arrests, deportations, and disappearances of Jews, and the constant fear of discovery that permeated their lives in hiding. She often mentions the arrests of Jews and the compulsory wearing of the yellow star. There are hints of darker rumours — references to Jews "being gassed" — but these remain vague and uncertain within the diary. Anne's writing captures the partial, rumour-based understanding of the Holocaust typical for Jews living under Nazi occupation at the time. Even while concealed in the Annex, they knew they faced mortal danger, but the full-scale, mechanization, and ideological fury driving the genocide would not have been clear from their limited vantage point.
In her diary, Anne wrote of her very close relationship with her father, lack of daughterly love for her mother (with whom she felt she had nothing in common), and admiration for her sister's intelligence and sweet nature. She did not like the others much initially, particularly Auguste van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer (the latter shared her room). She was at first unimpressed by the quiet Peter; she herself was something of a self-admitted chatterbox (a source of irritation to some of the others). As time went on, however, she and Peter became very close and spent a lot of time together. After a while Anne became disappointed in Peter and on 15 July 1944, she wrote in her diary that Peter could never be a 'kindred spirit'.
Editorial history
Publication in Dutch
"...[Th]ough Anne had made it plain that she wanted to become a famous writer, she had also made it clear that she wanted to keep her diary to herself. But finally [her father] decided that publication was what Anne would have wanted."
The first transcription of Anne's diary was in German, made by Otto Frank for his friends and relatives in Switzerland, who convinced him to send it for publication.