The Day Anne Frank's Diary Became a Book

On June 25, 1947, a small Amsterdam publishing house did something brave: it printed the private diary of a 15-year-old girl who had not survived the war.

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929, and her family fled to the Netherlands in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution. In July 1942, when the deportations began, the Franks went into hiding in a secret annex behind Otto Frank's business on the Prinsengracht canal in Amsterdam. Eight people lived in those cramped rooms for two years, sustained by a handful of helpers who risked their lives to feed them.

Anne kept a diary throughout, beginning on her 13th birthday in June 1942 and writing her last entry on August 1, 1944 — addressing her entries to an imaginary friend she called Kitty. Three days later, the hiding place was betrayed. The eight were arrested and deported. Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in the final months of the war, just weeks before the camp was liberated.

What saved the diary was quiet heroism. Miep Gies, one of the helpers, gathered up Anne's notebooks and loose pages from the emptied annex and kept them, hoping to return them to Anne. When Otto Frank — the only one of the eight to survive — returned to Amsterdam, she gave them to him. He read slowly, a few pages a day, discovering depths in his daughter he had never known.

Otto hesitated at first, then decided Anne's wish to become a writer should be honored. After an article by historian Jan Romein drew attention to the manuscript, Contact Publishing in Amsterdam agreed to publish it. Het Achterhuis — The Secret Annex — appeared on June 25, 1947, in a modest first edition of about 3,000 copies. It sold out, and by 1950 a sixth edition was in print. The 1952 English edition, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, carried her voice around the world; it has since been translated into more than 70 languages and sold tens of millions of copies.

In the spring of 1944, Anne heard a radio appeal from the Dutch government in exile asking citizens to preserve their wartime diaries and letters. She took it to heart, revising and polishing her entries with publication in mind — the version she crafted for readers became the basis of the book the world knows. She never lived to finish the job, but Otto Frank completed it for her, combining her original entries with her revised manuscript.

No document has given the Holocaust a more human face. Anne's diary is taught in schools on every continent, and the secret annex itself is now a museum visited by people from around the world — proof that one teenager's honest words can outlast an empire built on hate.

Photo: Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).