The Diary of a Young Girl

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank was published in Dutch in 1947 (and in English in 1952), using extracts from the diary she kept while in hiding during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands.

The Diaries of Anne Frank

Anne Frank began keeping a diary on her thirteenth birthday, June 12, 1942, three weeks before she went into hiding with her mother, father and sister and four other people in the sealed-off upper rooms of the annex of her father's office building in Amsterdam. With the assistance of a group of Otto Frank's trusted colleagues they remained hidden for two years, until their betrayal in August 1944, which resulted in their deportation to Nazi extermination camps. Of the group of eight, only Otto Frank survived the war. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen shortly before its liberation in April 1945.

Related Topics:
June 12 - 1942 - Mother - Father - Sister - Annex - Amsterdam - August - 1944 - Bergen-Belsen - April - 1945

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In manuscript, Anne's original diaries are written over three volumes. The first covers the period between June 12, 1942 and December 5, 1942 but since the second volume begins on December 22, 1943 and ends on April 17, 1944 we can assume that the original volume or volumes between December 1942 and December 1943 have been lost. This missing period however is covered in the version Anne rewrote for preservation. The third existing notebook contains entries from April 17 to August 2 1944, when Anne wrote for the last time before her arrest.

Related Topics:
December 22 - 1943 - April 17 - 1944 - August 2

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In the original notebook her diary entries follow a standard for the first three months until September 28 1942 when she began addressing her entries to characters from Cissy van Marxveldt's Joop ter Heul novels. In van Marxveldt's books the headstrong Joop also keeps a diary and writes to her group of friends about her calamities and loves. Anne adopted the group and addressed her diary entries to Joop's friends 'Kitty', 'Conny', 'Emmy', 'Pop', and 'Marianne' until November of that year, when the first notebook ends. By the time she started the second existing volume, there was only one imaginary friend she was writing to: Kitty.

Related Topics:
September 28 - 1942 - Cissy van Marxveldt

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There has been much conjecture about the identity or inspiration of Kitty, who in Anne's revised manuscript is the sole recipient of her letters. In 1986 the critic Sietse van der Hoech wrote that the name referred to Kitty Egyedi, a prewar friend of Frank's. Van der Hoech may have been informed by the 1970 publication 'A Tribute to Anne Frank', prepared by the Anne Frank Foundation, which assumed a factual basis for the character in its preface by the then chairman of the Foundation, Henri van Praag, and accentuated this with the inclusion of a group photograph that singles out Anne, Sanne Ledermann, Hanneli Goslar and Kitty Egyedi. Anne does not mention Kitty Egyedi in any of her writings (in fact the only other girl mentioned in her diary from the often reproduced photo, other than Goslar and Ledermann, is Mary Bos, whose drawings Anne dreamed about in 1944) and the only comparable example of Anne writing unposted letters to a real friend are two farewell letters to Jaqueline van Maarsen from September 1942.

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Theodore Holman wrote in reply to Sietse van der Hoech that the diary entry for September 28, 1942 proved conclusively the character's fictional origin. Jaqueline van Maarsen agreed but Otto Frank assumed his daughter had her real acquaintance in mind when she wrote to someone of the same name. However, Kitty Egyedi said in an interview that she was flattered by the assumption but doubted the diary was addressed to her:

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"Kitty became so idealized and started to lead her own life in the diary that it ceases to matter who is meant by 'Kitty'. The name ... is not meant to be me."

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Frank's already budding literary ambitions were galvanized on March 28, 1944 when she heard a broadcast made by the exiled Dutch Minister for Education, Art and Science, Gerrit Bolkestein, calling for the preservation of "ordinary documents—a diary, letters ... simple everyday material" to create an archive for posterity as testimony to the suffering of civilians during the Nazi occupation, and on May 20 notes that she has started re-drafting her diary with future readers in mind. She expanded entries and standardized them by addressing all of them to Kitty, clarified situations, prepared a list of pseudonyms and cut scenes she thought of little interest or too intimate for general consumption. This manuscript, written on loose sheets of paper, was retrieved from the hiding place after the arrest, and given to Otto Frank with the original notebooks when his daughter's death was confirmed in the autumn of 1945. Miep Gies and Bep Voskjuil had rescued them along with other personal possessions after the family's arrest and before their rooms were ransacked by the Dutch police and the Gestapo.

Related Topics:
March 28 - 1944 - May 20 - Miep Gies - Bep Voskjuil - Gestapo

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When Otto Frank eventually began to read his daughter's literary remains, he was astonished.

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