Title: The Diary of a Young Girl Author: Anne Frank Creation Date: 1942-1944 (written); 1947 (first publication) Location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands Collection: Banned, Burned & Dangerous Books
Brief
Annelies Marie Frank began writing her diary on 12 June 1942, her thirteenth birthday, two weeks before her family went into hiding in the rear annex of her father's office building at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. For 761 days, eight people lived in concealed rooms behind a bookcase, dependent on a handful of helpers for food, news, and survival. Anne wrote through it all — the arguments over food, the fear of discovery, puberty in a room shared with seven others, a first kiss in an attic overlooking a canal. On 4 August 1944, the Gestapo came up the stairs. The family was transported to Auschwitz. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, weeks before liberation, aged fifteen. Only her father Otto survived.
Miep Gies had gathered the diary pages from the annex floor after the arrest and kept them unread. She returned them to Otto, who edited and published the text in Dutch as Het Achterhuis in 1947, in English as The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952. Otto removed passages about Anne's body, her developing sexuality, and her sharp criticisms of her mother. The full unexpurgated text appeared in a critical edition in 1986, restoring everything the father had wished to protect. The diary has since been translated into more than seventy languages and sold an estimated thirty million copies. It is simultaneously the most widely read private document of the twentieth century and one of the most frequently challenged books in American schools — challenged, remarkably, not for what it records about the Holocaust, but for what it records about being thirteen.
The Banning
The diary has been suppressed from contradictory directions, each objection revealing the particular anxieties of the community that raised it. In Lebanon, around 2009, a Beirut school removed excerpts from its curriculum under pressure from Hezbollah, which argued the text promoted Zionism and violated laws against normalisation with Israel. Al-Manar television described the diary as a "Zionist invasion of education." The logic was explicit: a Jewish girl's intimate, particularised account of hiding from the Nazis could not be tolerated where the dominant political faction allied with a state that questioned the Holocaust's historical reality. The ban was not a formal government decree but an exercise of political pressure, and no reversal has occurred. The diary remains absent from Lebanese school curricula.
In the United States, challenges have come from an entirely different direction — parents objecting to Anne's descriptions of her own body. The passages at issue are her observations about puberty, menstruation, and her physical responses to proximity with Peter van Pels. These passages, omitted from Otto Frank's 1947 edition, were restored in the 1986 critical edition and subsequent definitive editions, and their restoration triggered a wave of challenges that has not subsided. Virginia parents challenged the book in 1982. Alabama parents called it "too depressing" in 1983. Culpeper County, Virginia, challenged it for "homosexual themes" in 2010 — a reference to Anne's brief, frank account of being fascinated by a female friend's body. In 2022, a Texas district removed the graphic-novel adaptation after a parent read from it at a board meeting; the decision was reversed following national outcry. In 2025, a Colorado federal judge ordered the diary's restoration after a district required parental permission, ruling that viewpoint-based censorship violated the First Amendment. The most widely read document of the Holocaust is challenged in America because a thirteen-year-old girl described her own body with the curiosity that thirteen-year-old girls possess.
The Fallout
The challenges have never removed the diary from broad circulation — it remains one of the most translated and widely read books on earth — but each challenge reveals the fault lines of the community in which it occurs. In Lebanon, the removal was part of Hezbollah's broader influence over educational institutions. The Aladdin Project, a UNESCO-supported initiative promoting intercultural understanding, called the action "intellectual intimidation," but the diary has not returned to Lebanese classrooms.
In the United States, the diary's defenders have consistently argued that the puberty passages are among the most pedagogically valuable sections of the text — the descriptions that make Anne real to adolescent readers, that allow students to recognise her as a person who experienced what they are experiencing rather than as a statistic in a history textbook. The majority of challenges have resulted in retention, but the need to make the argument repeatedly — decade after decade, school board after school board — suggests that the American educational system remains structurally uncomfortable with a text that refuses to separate adolescent sexuality from political atrocity.
Otto Frank's original editorial decision created an inadvertent trap. By removing what made Anne most fully a teenager, he produced a text that could be received as a saint's testimony rather than a girl's diary. When the 1986 critical edition restored the excised passages, readers were forced to confront the full complexity of a person who had been simplified into an icon. The challenges that followed were protests against the loss of that icon — against discovering that Anne Frank was a complicated, curious, brilliant girl whose inner life included desire, self-criticism, and the frank self-examination that adults find threatening when practised by children.
Why It Was Feared
The diary's power is its particularity. Anne Frank does not write about the Holocaust. She writes about the van Pels family's arguments over butter, her mother's inability to comfort her, Peter's cat Mouschi, the specific quality of fear when the building creaks at night and she does not know whether the sound is old timbers settling or the Gestapo on the stairs.
This particularity is what censors in Lebanon cannot tolerate. A Jewish girl so specific, so grounded in the ordinary textures of daily life, that the reader cannot maintain the intellectual distance political ideology requires. To read the diary is to know Anne Frank, and to know her is to be unable to dismiss her suffering as propaganda. The diary humanises what political movements need to keep abstract, and it does so through the voice of a child writing about what happened to her today.
The American objection shares the same underlying mechanism: discomfort with a text that refuses to be simple. The passages about puberty are not incidental to the diary's argument — they are its argument. Anne Frank is a girl simultaneously living through the most catastrophic event of the twentieth century and going through puberty, and the diary insists both experiences are real, that the body's development does not stop because the world is ending. The demand that the puberty passages be removed is a demand that the girl be reduced to a victim, stripped of the complexity that makes her recognisable as human. The censors want the icon: the brave girl who wrote beautiful things about hope. The diary gives them a person: a girl who wrote about hope and also about the shape of her own breasts, and who saw no contradiction between the two.
The Reading
Kitty
On June 12, 1942, Anne Frank turned thirteen and received, among her birthday presents, a red-and-white-checked autograph album that she had pointed out to her father in a shop window. She decided to use it as a diary, and because she felt she had no real friend to confide in — "I have loving parents and a sixteen-year-old sister, and there are about thirty people I can call friends... But I don't have a real friend" — she addressed her entries to an imaginary companion she named Kitty.
"I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support."
She was a Jewish girl living in Amsterdam under Nazi occupation, and within three weeks of writing those words, she would disappear from the world.
Before the Annex
The diary's opening entries sketched the life of an ordinary, bright, sociable girl in extraordinary circumstances. Anne's family — her father Otto, her mother Edith, and her older sister Margot — were German Jews who had emigrated to the Netherlands in 1933 when Hitler came to power. Otto Frank had built a business in Amsterdam, dealing in pectin, the gelling agent used to make jam. The family had settled into Dutch life, and Anne attended the Jewish Lyceum.
Anne catalogued the tightening restrictions with the matter-of-fact precision of a child recording the rules of a game she had not chosen to play. Jews were required to wear a yellow star. Jews were forbidden from riding streetcars. Jews could not visit theatres, cinemas, or swimming pools. Jews had to be indoors by eight o'clock. Jews could shop only between three and five in the afternoon. The list went on, and Anne reported each restriction with a briskness that barely concealed the bewilderment underneath.
On July 5, 1942, Margot received a call-up notice from the SS, ordering her to report for deportation to a labour camp. The family knew what this meant. Otto Frank had been preparing a hiding place for months — a concealed annex of rooms behind his office building at 263 Prinsengracht — and the call-up accelerated the plan. The next morning, wearing layers of clothing (Jews were not permitted to carry suitcases), the Franks walked through the rain to the annex.
The Secret Annex
The hiding place — which Anne called the Secret Annex (Het Achterhuis) — consisted of a few small rooms on the upper floors of the building behind Otto Frank's offices. The entrance was concealed behind a bookcase on hinges. The Franks were joined within days by another family: Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their son Peter, who was fifteen. Later, an eighth person arrived: Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist.
Eight people in a space smaller than most modern apartments, unable to leave, unable to make noise during business hours when workers were present below, dependent entirely on a small group of Dutch helpers — Miep Gies, Jan Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, and Victor Kugler — who risked their lives daily to bring food, news, and supplies.
The diary recorded the texture of this confinement with extraordinary specificity. The daily schedule: silence until the workers arrived at eight-thirty, then cautious movement, then a burst of activity when the workers went to lunch, then silence again, then the relief of evening when they could whisper and move more freely. The food: beans, potatoes, more beans, occasionally a treat smuggled in by Miep. The fear: the air-raid sirens, the sound of boots on the street, the knock at the door that might be the Green Police.
"I wander from room to room, climb up and down the stairs, and feel like a songbird whose wings have been clipped and who keeps hurling itself against the bars of its dark cage."
The People
What made the diary extraordinary was not the historical situation alone but the quality of Anne's observation. She saw everything and wrote it down with a candour that spared no one, least of all herself.
Her mother, Edith, bore the brunt of Anne's adolescent fury. "I face Mother with a certain detachment and observe her objectively," Anne wrote with the devastating clarity of a thirteen-year-old. "I look at Mother as a woman, not just a Mommy." She found her mother weak, sentimental, unable to understand her. The harshness of Anne's judgments of Edith is one of the diary's most uncomfortable features — and also one of the most honest.
Her father, Otto, was her anchor. "Daddy is the one I look up to. I love Daddy with everything I have." Otto Frank was patient, gentle, intellectual — the one person in the annex who could consistently reach Anne. Their bond was the emotional centre of the diary.
The Van Pels family provided an endless source of friction and fascination. Auguste van Pels was vain, quarrelsome, and prone to dramatic scenes. Their presence in the tight quarters generated conflicts that Anne recorded with the narrative instinct of a born writer: the arguments over food, over noise, over toilet use, over who was taking more than their share, over the petty grievances that swell to monstrous proportions when people cannot escape each other.
The War Outside
Through the curtained windows and the smuggled newspapers and the whispered reports of their helpers, the inhabitants of the annex followed the progress of the war. Anne recorded it all: the Allied landings in North Africa and Italy, the bombing raids over Amsterdam, the rumours of deportations and extermination camps, the slow advance of the Allies across Europe.
"I see the eight of us in the Annex as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds. The perfectly round spot on which we're standing is still safe, but the clouds are moving in on us."
She knew, with increasing clarity as the months passed, what was happening to the Jews who had not hidden. She heard the stories from Miep and the others. "We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they're being gassed." She was fourteen years old when she wrote that sentence. She wrote it and went on living, because what else could she do?
Peter
In the winter of 1943-1944, Anne fell in love with Peter van Pels. He was quiet, shy, a boy of no particular brilliance — but in the airless world of the annex, he was the only possibility. Anne, hungry for connection and starved for physical affection, pursued him with the determination she brought to everything. They climbed to his attic room. They sat by the window and watched the sky. They talked — or rather, Anne talked and Peter listened. They kissed. They held hands.
But Anne, with the honesty that was her most remarkable quality, eventually saw Peter clearly. He was kind but not strong. He was sweet but not deep. "Peter has too little character, too little will power, too little courage and strength," she wrote in one of her last entries. She was not cruel about it. She was clear-eyed, and she was fifteen.
The Writer
The diary was not merely a record. Anne intended it to be a book.
In March 1944, she heard a broadcast by Gerrit Bolkestein, the Dutch Minister of Education, who urged the Dutch people to preserve their wartime diaries and letters for publication after the war. Anne was electrified. She began revising her diary, rewriting entries, sharpening her prose, developing a literary voice. She gave the inhabitants of the annex pseudonyms. She imagined her diary as a published document, a testament of the occupation.
"I want to go on living even after my death!" she wrote. "And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me!"
Her entries on her own character were remarkable for their double consciousness — the ability to see herself both from inside and from outside, to be simultaneously the experiencing self and the observing self. "I have, as it were, a dual personality," she wrote. "One half embodies my exuberant cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life... This side of me is usually lying in wait to ambush the other one, which is much purer, deeper and finer." She was fifteen when she wrote that, and it was the kind of insight that many adults never achieve.
"I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn."
The Last Entries
The diary's final months were suffused with a strange double light: hope and dread, mingled inseparably. On June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy. Anne was ecstatic. "Is this really the beginning of the long-awaited liberation?"
The inhabitants of the annex followed the Allied advance across France with desperate attention, marking positions on a map, calculating distances, daring to imagine the end. "Oh, Kitty, the best part about the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are on the way."
Anne's last diary entry was dated August 1, 1944. It was a reflective, philosophical passage about her two selves — the outward Anne who laughed and joked, and the inner Anne who was serious, tender, and lonely. "I'm afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side. I'm afraid they'll mock me, think I'm ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously."
Three days later, on August 4, 1944, the Green Police arrived at 263 Prinsengracht. Whether the hiding place was betrayed, discovered by chance, or uncovered through some other investigation remains uncertain. The bookcase was pulled aside. The eight inhabitants of the Secret Annex were arrested.
After
Anne Frank did not survive the war. She was sent first to Westerbork, then to Auschwitz, then to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in February or March 1945 — weeks, perhaps days, before the camp was liberated by British troops. Margot died in the same camp, probably a few days before Anne. Edith Frank died in Auschwitz. Of the eight inhabitants of the annex, only Otto Frank survived.
Otto returned to Amsterdam. Miep Gies, who had found the diary scattered on the floor of the annex after the arrest and kept it in a desk drawer, unread, hoping to return it to Anne, gave it to Otto. He read it. He published it in 1947.
The diary has since been translated into more than seventy languages and read by tens of millions of people. Its power has not diminished because the paradox at its heart cannot be resolved: a girl of extraordinary intelligence, humour, and self-awareness — a girl who wanted to be a writer, who was becoming a writer, who had the talent and the will and the vision — was murdered at fifteen because she was Jewish, and the book she left behind is both her monument and the evidence of what was destroyed.
"I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart."
She wrote that on July 15, 1944, twenty days before her arrest. Whether she still believed it at Bergen-Belsen, no one can know. The sentence has become the most quoted line in the diary, used sometimes to console and sometimes to accuse. It is the sentence of a fifteen-year-old girl who had not yet seen the worst, and its innocence is both its beauty and its terror.
Bantam Books, 1997. The Definitive Edition — the complete text, including the passages that got the book banned.
Penguin Modern Classics, 2000. The same Definitive Edition in Penguin's trade paperback format — the standard text widely available in schools and bookshops.
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