The Diary of a Young Girl

Between July 1942 and August 1944, Anne Frank and seven others lived in the concealed upper rooms of an Amsterdam office building. Hidden behind a movable bookcase, the group consisted of the Frank family, the Van Pels family (renamed the Van Daans in the diary), and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer. They survived for over two years in total isolation from the outside world, supported by Otto Frank’s employees who risked their lives to provide food and news.

The atmosphere was defined by "partial understanding." While the residents were aware of the Normandy landings and the general persecution of Jews, they lacked a full view of the mechanized genocide occurring in the camps. Anne’s writing captures this tension: a mix of typical teenage friction—such as her difficult relationship with her mother and her budding romance with Peter van Pels—and the "constant fear of discovery" that permeated their daily existence.

Anne’s writing exists in two primary forms: Version A and Version B. Version A was her private, raw diary. However, after hearing a 1944 radio broadcast from the Dutch Minister for Education calling for the preservation of civilian documents to record the suffering of the occupation, Anne began "Version B." She started re-drafting her entries with future readers in mind, standardizing the format and removing passages she felt were too intimate or uninteresting for the public.

This transformation reveals Anne’s budding literary ambition. By May 1944, she was no longer just writing for herself; she was preparing a manuscript for posterity. She expanded entries, clarified situational details, and created a list of pseudonyms for the people in the Annex. This dual nature of the text—part spontaneous teen diary, part edited memoir—is what gives the book its unique balance of intimacy and narrative structure.

For decades, researchers debated the identity of "Kitty." While Anne had a pre-war friend named Kitty Egyedi, the character in the diary is likely fictional. Transcriptions from the 1980s revealed that Anne initially wrote to a group of eight different recipients. Most of these names, including "Kitty Francken," were characters from a series of popular novels by Cissy van Marxveldt that Anne was reading at the time.

By the end of 1942, Anne narrowed her focus to Kitty alone. In her Version B revisions, she consolidated all previous entries to address them to Kitty, creating a "true friend" to whom she could confide her deepest thoughts. This fictional framework allowed Anne to transition from writing "letters to no one" to a structured narrative where she could express the "kindred spirit" connection she felt she lacked in the physical Annex.

When the Annex was finally raided on August 4, 1944, the Gestapo ransacked the rooms but left the diary papers strewn on the floor. Helpers Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl rescued the loose sheets and notebooks before the rooms were cleared by Nazi authorities. Miep stored them in a desk drawer, intending to return them to Anne. Only after Anne's death was confirmed in July 1945 did Miep hand the unread papers to Otto Frank, the family's sole survivor.

Otto was initially hesitant to publish the private thoughts of his deceased daughter. However, he was persuaded by friends and historians who recognized the diary’s immense symbolic value. Dutch historian Jan Romein famously described the diary as "embodying all the hideousness of fascism" more effectively than the evidence at the Nuremberg trials. The first edition, Het Achterhuis, was published in 1947, eventually reaching global fame and translation into over 70 languages.

For decades, the prevailing narrative was that the Frank family was betrayed by an anonymous tipster. However, recent research suggests a different possibility: the police raid on the building may have been targeting "ration fraud." The investigative team that discovered the Annex was part of a department that handled illegal work and ration card violations, not specifically the "Jew hunting" units.

The group was discovered just six weeks before the Allies breached the Dutch border. Of the eight people in hiding, only Otto Frank returned. Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945, only a few weeks before the camp was liberated by British troops. This narrow margin between survival and death adds a layer of profound tragedy to the diary's conclusion.