Diary of Anne Frank is a diary written by Anne Frank, a German-Jewish girl. Frank wrote the diary from 1942 to 1944, while she was in hiding with her family from the Nazis in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, during World War II (1939-1945). The diary was first published in 1947 and has been translated into more than 60 languages. It became an international best seller and one of the most stirring documents to come out of the Holocaust, the systematic Nazi campaign to murder Jews.
Anne Frank lived in hiding with her father, mother, sister, and four other Jews in a secret annex in the Amsterdam office and warehouse of her father’s food products business. She made her first entry in the diary on June 12, 1942. The diary sensitively traces her emotional growth and records the stresses of living in close quarters with seven other people as well as the constant fear of discovery. During 1944, Anne rewrote and edited the diary, intending to publish a book based on it after the war. Anne thus left two versions of the diary, one edited and the other unedited.
Anne made her last diary entry on Aug. 1, 1944. Three days later, all eight people living in the annex were arrested by the Nazis. Anne eventually was transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany with her sister. Anne died there of typhus in 1945.
Two secretaries who worked in the warehouse found Anne’s diary scattered over the floor of the annex after her arrest. One of the secretaries preserved the diary until after the war. She gave the pages, unread, to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, the only person from the annex to survive the war.
Otto Frank published his daughter’s diary in 1947 under the Dutch title Het Achterhuis (The House Behind). It was published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl. Frank omitted several passages dealing with Anne’s sexuality as well as unflattering comments the girl made about her mother and other residents of the annex.
After the diary’s publication, some people challenged its authenticity. The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation thoroughly investigated the diary and declared it genuine. In 1986, the institute published a massive critical edition of the diary. The edition included the original diary, Anne’s edited version, and her father’s version, as well as essays about the Frank family and the evidence for the diary’s authenticity. The Anne Frank Foundation issued a “definitive edition” in 1991 that included about 30 percent more material than appeared in the 1947 edition. In 1998, six new pages of the diary were revealed. They contained critical comments about the Franks’s marriage and had been withheld from publication by Otto Frank, who died in 1980. In 2003, the Netherlands Institute issued The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition, which includes all three versions of the diary plus additional writings by Anne Frank, including an unfinished novel.
The diary was adapted into a hit play that opened in New York City in 1955. A motion-picture adaptation of the play was released in 1959.
See also Frank, Anne; Holocaust.
