A Teenager Hiding in an Attic — The Diary of a Young Girl

Title: The Diary of a Young Girl Author: Anne Frank Creation Date: 1942-1944 (written); 1947 (first publication) Location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Summary

From June 12, 1942 to August 1, 1944, thirteen-year-old Anne Frank kept a diary while hiding with her family and four other Jews in a concealed annex behind her father's office building in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. The diary records two years of confinement: the daily tensions of eight people sharing cramped quarters, the fear of discovery, the news from outside of deportations and Allied advances, Anne's complicated relationships with her mother and the other inhabitants, her first love with Peter van Pels, and her fierce ambition to become a writer. Anne revised parts of the diary herself, intending to publish it after the war as a document of life under occupation. On August 4, 1944, the hiding place was raided. Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945, weeks before liberation. Her father, the sole survivor, published the diary in 1947.

Why This Book Matters

The Diary is the most widely read document of the Holocaust and one of the most important civilian war testimonies ever produced. Its power derives from a paradox: Anne writes with the immediacy and vitality of an intelligent adolescent — complaints about her mother, excitement about a boy, literary ambitions — while the machinery of genocide closes around her. The reader knows what Anne does not: that the diary will end, that she will be captured, that she will die. This dramatic irony makes the diary an unbearable document of what war does to civilians, particularly to the most vulnerable. For a collection concerned with war and power, Anne Frank's diary represents the perspective that military history almost never records: the experience of those who are neither soldiers nor strategists but targets — people whose only relationship to power is to be crushed by it.

Historical Context

The Frank family fled Germany for the Netherlands in 1933 when Hitler came to power. After the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, anti-Jewish measures escalated rapidly: forced registration, yellow stars, exclusion from schools and public life, and then deportations to extermination camps. The Franks went into hiding in July 1942 with the help of Dutch employees who risked their lives to supply food and news. Over 100,000 Dutch Jews — three-quarters of the Jewish population of the Netherlands — were murdered in the Holocaust. The diary was preserved by Miep Gies, one of the helpers, who found it after the raid and kept it unread, hoping to return it to Anne.

Literary Significance

Anne Frank was a genuinely gifted writer, not merely a witness. She revised her diary with an eye toward publication, developing a narrative voice that is by turns witty, self-critical, philosophically probing, and achingly honest. The diary belongs to a literary tradition — wartime testimony — that includes Samuel Pepys's diary of the Great Fire of London and the journals of the World War I poets, but Anne's achievement is unique: she created an intimate portrait of interiority under existential threat that has no precedent. The book has been translated into over 70 languages, making it one of the most widely read texts about the consequences of totalitarian power and genocidal warfare.

Research Notes

The diary is flagged to represent the civilian experience of total war and genocide. While extremely well-known, it does not fit neatly into any single literary tradition — not a Dutch literary landmark, not a work of Jewish theology, not a conventional autobiography. Its importance is specifically as war literature: it is the most powerful document we possess of what it means to be a civilian target of genocidal power. The recommended edition is the Definitive Edition (Doubleday, 1995), which restores passages cut from the original publication.

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.

This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →

The recommended edition is the Definitive Edition, edited by Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler, translated by Susan Massotty (Doubleday, 1995), which restores passages cut from the original publication. The Bantam paperback edition is the most widely available.

By Anne Frank. The complete, unabridged Definitive Edition — the version recommended for first-time readers.