Hidden Pages Uncovered in Anne Frank’s Diary

Anne Frank became famous for the diary she wrote while hiding with her family from the Germans during World War II. The diary is one of the best known accounts of the time but over the years we’ve had many revelations about Anne Frank’s Diary. Several years after it was released, Otto Frank confessed that he had removed some part from the diary where Anne spoke about sex, and made criticisms of her mother leading to the ‘Definitive version’ being released.

Today we hear more about the diary, giving further insights into Anne Frank’s character as researchers uncover several more pages that were originally stuck together.

On Tuesday Anne Frank’s house announced that thanks to new scanning techniques, these pages could be read for the first time in 75 years. We assume Anne didn’t want the pages to be read by her family and so she pasted brown pages over the spoiled pages but now they can be read for the first time.

The pages give an insight into the precocious and sometimes cheeky teenager Anne Frank was. We already got a taste of this from her writing, but these hidden pages reveal more of Anne’s true self, as a person and teenager rather than as an icon of the Holocaust. The pages contain a multitude of information and much of it might have been considered inappropriate at the time, including talk of prostitutes and dirty jokes.

“I’ll use this spoiled page to write down ‘dirty’ jokes,” Anne Frank wrote in her diary in September 1942, during her first few months in hiding. On the pages she wrote several jokes, and wrote about prostitutes including a reference to her father writing…

“All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together,” she wrote. “In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there.”

She also wrote several jokes and these included

“Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in Holland? As mattresses for the soldiers.”

And

“A man had a very ugly wife and he didn’t want to have relations with her. One evening he came home and then he saw his friend in bed with his wife, then the man said: `He gets to and I have to!!!”‘

There’s also another joke referring to a man hiding in a cupboard when caught cheating and together they give an insight into the sexual curiosity of Anne Frank, who seems to be on a par with most girls her age.

Of course what as always been most striking about Anne Frank, is that save for the general subject matter, her diary could be written by any teenage girl the world over, back then, or right now. The new pages allow us to feel as though we know Anne a little better, which is fantastic when you consider that her true personality has been somewhat overshadowed by the symbol she has become.

The Diary of a Young Girl US
The Diary of a Young Girl UK