A short life of the author
Anne Frank’s diary is the most intimate document of the Holocaust — not because it describes the horrors of the camps (she did not write about Bergen-Belsen, where she died), but because it records with extraordinary vividness the daily life of a Jewish family in hiding, the fears and frustrations of confinement, and the inner world of a brilliantly articulate thirteen-year-old girl who was discovering her identity, her sexuality, and her literary ambition at the very moment that the Nazi regime was working to exterminate her. The diary’s power comes from the gap between the ordinary, even comic, details of life in the Secret Annex and the monstrous reality that surrounds it — a gap of which the reader is always aware but Anne, writing in the present tense of her daily life, cannot fully comprehend.
The Secret Annex
Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1929 into a liberal Jewish family. Her father Otto Frank was a businessman. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the family emigrated to Amsterdam, where Otto established a business selling pectin and spices. When the Germans occupied the Netherlands in 1940, anti-Jewish measures were imposed with increasing severity.
On 6 July 1942, when Anne was thirteen, the family went into hiding in a concealed set of rooms above Otto Frank’s business premises at 263 Prinsengracht — the space Anne called het Achterhuis (the Secret Annex). They were joined by the Van Pels family (three people) and Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist. Eight people lived in a few small rooms for over two years, dependent on the courage and loyalty of a small group of Dutch helpers — Miep Gies, Jan Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, and Victor Kugler — who supplied food, news, and an essential connection to the outside world.
The Diary
Anne received a red-and-white checkered autograph album for her thirteenth birthday, on 12 June 1942, and began using it as a diary. She addressed her entries to an imaginary friend, “Kitty,” and wrote with a literary self-consciousness that was remarkable for her age. When she heard a radio broadcast by the Dutch minister of education, Gerrit Bolkestein, calling for the preservation of personal documents from the occupation — diaries, letters, sermons — Anne decided to revise her diary for publication after the war, working on a second version that tightened the prose, developed the characterisation, and shaped the raw diary entries into a more literary narrative.
The diary records the petty conflicts and rare pleasures of life in hiding — the arguments about food, the terror of break-ins, the comic tension between the families, her complicated feelings about her mother, her growing love for Peter van Pels, her reading and writing. It also records Anne’s development as a thinker and a writer: her reflections on identity, on the relationship between her public and private selves, on the nature of courage, on her desire to be a writer and “to go on living even after my death.”
Arrest and Death
On 4 August 1944, the Secret Annex was raided by the German Security Police. All eight occupants were arrested and deported. Anne and her sister Margot were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus in February or March 1945, only weeks before the camp was liberated.
Otto Frank was the sole survivor. Miep Gies had gathered Anne’s papers after the arrest and kept them unread. When Otto returned to Amsterdam, she gave them to him. He arranged for publication.
Publication and Impact
Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex) was published in Amsterdam in 1947 in an edition prepared by Otto Frank, who made some cuts — particularly of passages about Anne’s sexual feelings and her harsh comments about her mother. The English translation, The Diary of a Young Girl, appeared in 1952 and became a worldwide bestseller. The dramatisation by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (1955) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and reached millions through stage and film.
The Definitive Edition (1995), based on the Critical Edition prepared by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (1989), restored most of the passages Otto Frank had removed and provided the fullest available text of the diary.
The diary has been translated into over seventy languages and has sold over thirty million copies. The Anne Frank House at 263 Prinsengracht is one of the most visited museums in the world.
The Diary as Literature
The diary’s literary quality is not incidental to its emotional impact. Anne was a genuine writer — observant, witty, self-critical, capable of characterisation and scene-setting that are far beyond what one would expect from a teenager. Her desire to be a professional writer gives the diary an additional poignancy: the diary is at once the record of a life cut short and the evidence of a literary talent that was destroyed before it could develop.
Collecting Frank
Het Achterhuis (Contact, Amsterdam, 1947) in first edition is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. The first Dutch edition was published in a run of 1,500 copies and is genuinely rare. The first English edition, The Diary of a Young Girl (Doubleday, 1952), is also scarce in fine condition with dust jacket. The Critical Edition (1989) and the Definitive Edition (1995) are the standard scholarly and reading texts.