The Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank
Summary
From June 1942, when her family went into hiding in a concealed annex above her father's Amsterdam office building, until her final entry on 1 August 1944, three days before the Franks were discovered and arrested, Anne Frank kept a diary addressed to an imagined friend she called Kitty, working across two years of confinement with seven other people, her parents, her older sister Margot, the van Pels family and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer sharing the same cramped rooms. She writes about the daily friction of eight people never allowed outside, rationed food, arguments over noise and space, her own uneasy relationship with her mother, and a tentative, growing closeness with Peter van Pels, the teenage son of the family sharing their hiding place, alongside her wider ambitions to become a writer or journalist after the war. The diary breaks off mid thought with her final entry, still ordinary in tone, three days before the Gestapo, acting on a tip from an informer whose identity has never been conclusively established, raided the annex. Anne, her sister, and her mother all died in Nazi camps; only her father, Otto Frank, survived the war. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, two of the Dutch employees who had hidden and supplied the family for two years, recovered Anne's notebooks and loose pages from the ransacked annex floor after the arrest and kept them, unread, until they could hand them to Otto Frank once he returned alone from Auschwitz.
Anne's own voice carries the book, sharp, funny, self critical, and often far more articulate about her own contradictions than most published memoirs manage from writers three times her age. It reads intimately rather than historically, closer to overhearing a real teenager's private thoughts than to reading a document about the Holocaust, which is exactly what gives the historical horror surrounding it its full weight; the diary itself stays almost entirely inside the annex, and what happened after the last entry is left for a reader who already knows.
Otto Frank prepared the diary for publication himself, combining Anne's original diary with a second version she had begun rewriting for eventual publication before her arrest, and selecting from both. Contact Publishing brought out the Dutch edition, Het Achterhuis, in June 1947 in a first printing of 3,000 copies that sold out quickly.
Historical Context & Significance
The diary is nonfiction, an actual document rather than an invented narrative, so it was never eligible for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in any language or edition; Doubleday published the first English translation in the United States in 1952. The closest the book came to that prize arrived through an adaptation rather than the diary itself: The Diary of Anne Frank, a 1955 Broadway play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett drawn from the book, won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an honor that belongs to the playwrights' stage version rather than to Anne Frank's own writing.
The Dutch historian Jan Romein reviewed the diary in Het Parool in 1946, before it was even published as a book, calling it a document that embodies all the hideousness of fascism, a review widely credited with helping the manuscript find a publisher. It has since been translated into more than seventy languages, sold over thirty five million copies, and been adapted into a 1959 Academy Award winning film and, in 2009, entered UNESCO's Memory of the World register as a document of global historical significance.