Kenneth Glad
Personal records can reveal how people understood extraordinary events while living through them. Some survive only because others recognize their importance and protect them.
After Anne Frank and seven other Jewish people were arrested in Amsterdam, helpers Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl returned to the abandoned annex at Prinsengracht 263. According to the Anne Frank House, they recovered Anne’s diaries, notebooks and loose pages from the rooms, where the arresting officers had searched the residents’ belongings.
The women gathered the material, and Gies placed it in a drawer in her office. She did not read the pages because she considered them private and hoped to return them when Anne came home. Gies also approached the headquarters of the German security service in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain the prisoners’ release.
Anne never returned. Gies gave the papers to Otto Frank after he learned that his daughters had died. Otto was the only one of the annex’s eight residents to survive the Holocaust.
The collection contained two forms of Anne’s work. She had continued writing her original diary while producing a second manuscript intended for publication. The earlier entries are generally called Version A, while the rewritten text is known as Version B.
Anne began the second version after hearing a Radio Oranje broadcast on March 28, 1944. Gerrit Bolkestein, education minister in the Dutch government in exile, asked people in the occupied Netherlands to preserve diaries, letters and other records for collection after the war.
From May 20, Anne rewrote a substantial part of her diary. She removed material, added explanations and used alternative names for several people. She chose The Secret Annex as the proposed title of the book.
She revised her own story
The decision marked a change in the way Anne approached her writing. Her original diary remained a place for immediate reactions, but the second version gave her, according to history site Historienet, an opportunity to reconsider events and make them understandable to readers who had never experienced life in hiding.
She was also writing more than a diary. The surviving papers include stories and other work, showing that her ambition extended beyond documenting the occupation. She hoped to work as a journalist and later become an author.
Her writing developed under conditions that allowed little control over time or space. The Frank family entered the annex in July 1942 after Anne’s older sister, Margot, received a summons for forced labor. They shared the concealed rooms with Hermann and Auguste van Pels, their son Peter and dentist Fritz Pfeffer.
The working day in the building below determined the residents’ routine. They rose early and moved cautiously while warehouse employees were present. At certain hours, even running water or flushing a toilet could create unwanted noise.
Writing through the daily routine
At 9 a.m., when the office staff began work, sounds from above became less suspicious. The residents spent much of the morning reading, studying or preparing food. During the warehouse workers’ lunch break, helpers could visit the annex, bringing provisions and news from Amsterdam.
The BBC broadcast was usually heard at 1 p.m. After the offices closed in the evening, the group could move into other parts of the building. Windows still had to remain covered, and the rooms became quiet again after dark.
Anne used the afternoon for lessons and writing, often returning to her papers while others rested. Her subjects ranged from disagreements within the household to air raids, shortages and her changing relationship with her parents. The entries also record her attempts to understand her own character as she moved through adolescence in confinement.
The revision project therefore served a practical as well as literary purpose. It gave Anne a task with a future attached to it. While the group waited for military developments they could not influence, she could select, reorganize and improve the account she hoped to carry out of the annex herself.
The manuscript outlived its author
On August 4, 1944, an arrest team from the German security police entered the building. Anne, the seven other people in hiding and two of their helpers were detained. Investigations have never conclusively established how the authorities discovered the annex, and no theory involving an informant has been proved.
The eight residents were taken first to a detention facility and then to the Westerbork transit camp. Westerbork was a central point in the deportation of Jews from the Netherlands. More than 100,000 Jewish prisoners passed through the camp before transports carried most of them east, primarily to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor.
The annex residents were placed aboard the final transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, families were separated. Otto remained in the camp, while Anne and Margot were later transported to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany.
Conditions at Bergen-Belsen deteriorated sharply as prisoners arrived from camps evacuated ahead of advancing Allied forces. Overcrowding, hunger and disease spread through the camp. Anne and Margot died there in February or March 1945, probably during a typhus epidemic. British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15.
Father brought her work to readers
After returning to Amsterdam, Otto Frank typed selections from Anne’s papers for relatives and friends. The surviving material included her red-checkered diary, two additional notebooks and more than 200 loose pages.
He later used both the original entries and Anne’s revised manuscript to prepare the book for publication. The published text therefore combined her private record with the version she had begun shaping for a wider audience.
A typescript eventually reached Dutch historian Jan Romein, who wrote publicly about the manuscript. His response helped attract the interest of Contact Publishers, although the text underwent editorial changes before appearing in print.
The first Dutch edition of Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex) was published on June 25, 1947, in an initial print run of 3,036 copies.
Five years later, the English translation, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, introduced Anne’s writing to a far wider audience. Since then, the book has been translated into more than 70 languages and sold more than 30 million copies worldwide
Sources: Historienet, Anne Frank House
