The German Jewish diarist, Anne Frank who happens to be one of the most famous victims of the Holocaust, had a diary where she wrote details of her life till the Nazis took her and her family. This diary which ended up being published by her father after he was rescued from the concentration camp, became a bestseller.
After the Holocaust, Anne Frank’s house became a national treasure and a symbol of this event that stands out in German History. Officials at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam announced that they discovered two hidden pages in her diary; these pages also showed a more earthy side of the teenage girl.
This hidden writing was found behind a brown paper covering two pages of her diary. During a routine check-in in 2016, conservators took pictures of the diary’s condition; however, advanced imaging technology has revealed the text under the pages.
Anne Frank started writing an entry on 28th September 1942; then, she ruined the pages. She noted that she’d leave the spoilt page to write down ‘dirty’ jokes. She wrote down four, some imaginary lessons on sex education and some information on prostitutes.
The Anne Frank house added that at the end of it, she explicitly names her father, Otto, who had been in Paris and seen houses with prostitutes.
It remains uncertain when Anne Frank made the entries on the newly discovered texts, but it’s presumed that Anne pasted the paper over the written texts though nobody knows when and why. The Anne Frank House, however, did not release the text along with the announcement.
When Anne Frank began writing in her diary, she was 12 years old, and like other children her age, she was curious about sex and relationships. In her diary, she had some entries about menstruation and her changing body, shared her sexual feelings toward members of the same and opposite sex and wrote some jokes that were sexual.
Her diary, which was first published in 1952, eight years after her death in a concentration camp, didn’t contain any of her candid thoughts about sex. While Anne Frank edited her diary with hopes of it being published, more information was removed when doing another edit.
Another edition was published in 1986, sharing more of the original content than the first. Finally, in 1995, a less censored version with an entry on Frank’s body that her father had previously withheld was published.
While over time, numerous more pages have been uncovered and released, this discovery in which she talked about sex isn’t strange as she entered teenager and even had a short-lived romantic relationship with Peter van Pels, a boy who was in hiding with Frank’s family while they lived in the secret annexe.
The diary has been read widely by people of all age groups and enables us to see from the eyes of this teenage girl who lived through the holocaust and died in 1945.
