Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank
List Price: $12.95
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0385480334
Publisher: Anchor
On June 12, 1942, Anne Frank's parents gave her a small red-and-white-plaid diary for her thirteenth birthday. More than fifty years later, this diary has become one of the best-known memoirs of the Holocaust.
When Anne received her diary, she and her family were living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which was occupied by the German Army. By Anne's thirteenth birthday she, like every other European Jew, was living in fear of the Nazis and their anti-Jewish decrees. On July 6, 1942, her family was forced to go into hiding. Although they could take very few things with them, Anne brought her diary to her new home, which she called the "Secret Annex." For the two years that Anne lived in the Annex, she wrote down her thoughts and feelings. She wrote about her life with the seven other people in hiding--her parents, her sister, the van Pels family (called van Daan by Anne), and Fritz Pfeffer (called Alfred Dussel by Anne), as well as the war going on around her and her hopes for the future.
As a result of a radio broadcast made by the Dutch government in exile asking people to save their wartime diaries for publication after the war, Anne decided to rewrite her diary entries.
On August 4, 1944, the Nazis raided the Secret Annex and arrested the residents. Anne's entire diary--including the plaid book, notebooks, and loose sheets of paper--remained behind in the Annex. Tragically, Anne Frank did not survive the Holocaust. Her father, Otto Frank, returned to Amsterdam after the war ended, the sole survivor among those who had hid in the Secret Annex. When he found out that Anne had died in one of the concentration camps, Miep Gies, a woman who had risked her life to hide the Franks, gave him Anne's diary, which she had hidden for almost a year. As he read the entries, he was deeply moved by his daughter's descriptions of life in the Annex and her feelings about her family and the other residents. He decided to publish the diary so that readers would learn about the effects of the Nazi dictatorship and its process of dehumanization.
In the immediate aftermath of the war it was not easy for Otto to find a publisher for Anne's work. He was told that no one wanted to read about the Holocaust. Finally a newspaper called Het Parool printed a story about Anne's diary that captured the interest of Contact Publishers, a Dutch firm. In June 1947 Contact published 1,500 copies of the first Dutch edition of the diary. Within years the Contact edition was translated into German, French, and English. Today this version is available in fifty-five languages, and over 24 million copies have been sold.
The first edition omitted almost 30 percent of Anne's original diary. Otto Frank quite deliberately excluded sections where Anne expressed negative feelings about her mother and others in the Annex, believing that Anne would not have wanted such views made public. In addition, Contact was a conservative publishing house and was uncomfortable printing Anne's entries concerning her burgeoning sexuality.
Otto Frank bequeathed the diary to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie [RIOD]), which received it after his death in 1980. Scholars associated with RIOD were particularly interested in refuting the accusations by neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers that the diary was a hoax. To establish its validity, RIOD performed tests on the paper, ink, and glue used in the diary, proving that it was written during the 1940s. Also, tests were performed on Anne's handwriting, comparing samples from the diary with her other writings, which included letters with dated stamp cancellations.
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