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. Miep gave them to Anne's father, Otto Frank, the family's only survivor, just after the Second World War was over.
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.[6][7]
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.[8][9] 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.[9] She entered a one-sentence note on her birthday, writing "I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support."[10][11] The main diary was written from 14 June.[12][13]
On 5 July 1942, Anne's then-15-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.[14] Their hiding place was in the sealed-off upper rooms of the annex at the back of Otto's company building in Amsterdam.[14][15] 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,[16] 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 Dussel. With the assistance of a group of Otto Frank's trusted colleagues, they remained hidden for two years and one month.[17][18]
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".[19] 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.[20]
The manuscript, written on loose sheets of paper, was found strewn on the floor of the hiding place by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl after the family's arrest,[22] but before their rooms were ransacked by a special department of the Amsterdam office of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, Nazi intelligence agency) for which many Dutch collaborators worked.[23] The papers were given to Otto Frank after the war, when Anne's death was confirmed in July 1945 by sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, who were with Margot and Anne in Bergen-Belsen.[24]
The diary is not written in the classic forms of "Dear Diary" or as letters to oneself; Anne calls her diary "Kitty", so almost all of the letters are written to Kitty. Anne used the above-mentioned names for her annex-mates in the first volume, from 25 September 1942 until 13 November 1942, when the first notebook ends.[25] It is believed that these names were taken from characters found in a series of popular Dutch books written by Cissy van Marxveldt.[25]
For many years there was much conjecture about the identity of or inspiration for Kitty. In 1996, the critic Sietse van der Hoek wrote that the name referred to Kitty Egyedi, a prewar friend of Anne's. Van der Hoek may have been informed by the publication A Tribute to Anne Frank (1970), prepared by the Anne Frank Foundation, which assumed a factual basis for the character in its preface by the then-chairman of the Foundation, Henri van Praag, and accentuated this with the inclusion of a group photograph that singles out Anne, Sanne Ledermann, Hanneli Goslar, and Kitty Egyedi. However, Anne does not mention Egyedi in any of her writings (in fact, the only other girl mentioned in her diary from the often reproduced photo, other than Goslar and Ledermann, is Mary Bos, whose drawings Anne dreamed about in 1944) and the only comparable example of Anne's writing un-posted letters to a real friend are two farewell letters to Jacqueline van Maarsen, from September 1942.[27]
Theodor Holman wrote in reply to Sietse van der Hoek that the diary entry for 28 September 1942 proved conclusively the character's fictional origin.[citation needed] Jacqueline van Maarsen agreed,[citation needed] but Otto Frank assumed his daughter had her real acquaintance in mind when she wrote to someone of the same name.[citation needed] Kitty Egyedi said in an interview that she was flattered by the possibility it was her, but stated:
Only when Anne Frank's diaries were transcribed in the 1980s did it emerge that 'Kitty' was not unique; she was one of a group of eight recipients to whom Anne addressed the first few months of her diary entries. In some of the notes, Anne references the other names, suggesting she imagined they all knew each other. With the exception of Kitty, none of the names were of people from Anne's real-life social circle. Three of the names may be imaginary, but five of them correspond to the names of a group of friends from the novels of Cissy van Marxveldt, which Anne was reading at the time. 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.[citation needed]
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'.[29]
There are two versions of the diary written by Anne Frank. She wrote the first version in a designated diary and two notebooks (version A), but rewrote it (version B) in 1944 after hearing on the radio that war-time diaries were to be collected to document the war period. Version B was written on loose paper, and is not identical to Version A, as parts were added and others omitted.[30]
"...[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."[31]
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.[32] The second, a composite of Anne Frank's versions A and B as well as excerpts from her essays, became the first draft submitted for publication, with an epilogue written by a family friend explaining the fate of its author. In the spring of 1946, it came to the attention of Dr. Jan Romein and his wife Annie Romein-Verschoor, two Dutch historians. They were so moved by it that Anne Romein made unsuccessful attempts to find a publisher, which led Romein to write an article for the newspaper Het Parool:[33]
This apparently inconsequential diary by a child, this "de profundis" stammered out in a child's voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence of Nuremberg put together.
In 1986, a critical edition appeared, incorporating versions A and B, and based on the findings of the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation into challenges to the diary's authenticity. This was published in three volumes with a total of 714 pages.[34]
In 1950, the Dutch translator Rosey E. Pool made a first English translation of the diary, which was never published.[35] At the end of 1950, another translator was found to produce an English-language version. Barbara Mooyaart-Doubleday was contracted by Vallentine Mitchell in England, and by the end of the following year, her translation was submitted, now including the deleted passages at Otto Frank's request. As well, Judith Jones, while working for the publisher Doubleday, read and recommended the Diary, pulling it out of the rejection pile.[36] Jones recalled that she came across Frank's work in a slush pile of material that had been rejected by other publishers; she was struck by a photograph of the girl on the cover of an advance copy of the French edition. "I read it all day", she noted. "When my boss returned, I told him, 'We have to publish this book.' He said, 'What? That book by that kid?'" She brought the diary to the attention of Doubleday's New York office. "I made the book quite important because I was so taken with it, and I felt it would have a real market in America. It's one of those seminal books that will never be forgotten", Jones said.[37]The book appeared in the United States and in the United Kingdom in 1952, becoming a best-seller. The introduction to the English publication was written by Eleanor Roosevelt.
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