Anne Frank rewrote her diary to publish it after the war

Person: Anne Frank
Lived: 1929–1945
Field: Writing
From: Dutch-German

The story

Anne Frank received a red-and-white checked autograph book for her thirteenth birthday, on 12 June 1942, and began using it as a diary almost at once. Three weeks later her family went into hiding in the Secret Annex behind her father's business on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. At first the diary was strictly private, and she wrote more than once that she would never let anyone read it.

Writing became part of her daily routine in hiding. She addressed her entries as letters to a circle of imaginary friends, several of them borrowed from the Joop ter Heul novels by Cissy van Marxveldt that she loved. One of these, Kitty, first appeared on 22 September 1942 and gradually became her favourite; from December 1943 Anne addressed every letter to her.

In March 1944 she heard a radio broadcast from London by Gerrit Bolkestein, a minister in the Dutch government in exile. He said that after the war he wanted to create a public record of the Dutch people's suffering under German occupation, and he mentioned the value of letters and diaries. Anne decided she would submit her work when the time came.

From that spring, and especially from 20 May 1944, she set about turning her diary into a book, writing a new version on loose sheets of paper. She chose a title, Het Achterhuis, The Annex, and invented pseudonyms for the people in hiding and their helpers: the Van Pels family became the Van Daans and Fritz Pfeffer became Albert Düssel. She cut passages she now found too private or too harsh, including some about her mother and her feelings for Peter van Pels, and she sharpened others, making scenes more vivid and her descriptions more precise. The Anne Frank House notes that by spring 1944 the girl with the diary had grown into a real writer.

She dreamed of becoming a journalist and author, and she kept writing until her last entry on 1 August 1944, three days before the hiding place was raided. After the war her father, Otto, the family's only survivor, used both her original diary and her own revised version to prepare the first edition, published in Dutch in 1947 under the title she had chosen. Anne's own editing shaped the book that readers know, and it has since been translated into more than 75 languages.