Title: The Diary of a Young Girl (Het Achterhuis) Author: Anne Frank Creation Date: 1947 Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt in 1929 to an assimilated German-Jewish family. When Hitler took power in 1933, the family moved to Amsterdam. Anne grew up speaking Dutch, attended a Montessori school, and was an ordinary schoolgirl until the German occupation began rolling out anti-Jewish measures. By spring 1942, deportation had begun. Otto Frank had prepared a hiding place: a concealed back annex at Prinsengracht 263, accessed through a bookcase. Eight people lived in the concealed rooms for over two years, kept alive by four employees — Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, and Victor Kugler.
Anne had received a red-and-white checked notebook for her thirteenth birthday and began using it as a diary addressed to "Kitty." In March 1944, hearing a broadcast urging citizens to preserve diaries as historical evidence, she began revising her entries for postwar publication — performing the work of a professional writer at fourteen. On 4 August 1944 the Gestapo raided the annex. All eight were deported. Anne and Margot died at Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, weeks before liberation. Only Otto survived. Miep Gies gathered the scattered diary pages from the ransacked annex and kept them unread until Otto's return.
Published in 1947, translated into English in 1952, the diary has sold over thirty million copies in more than seventy languages. It is the single most widely read document of the Holocaust — and a work of genuine literary quality produced by a girl who had decided, in hiding, that she would be a writer.
The Prohibition
Anne Frank was not prohibited from writing because she was a woman. She was prohibited from existing. The barrier was not social convention or literary gatekeeping but a state apparatus designed to murder her and every Jewish person in Europe, and the diary was written inside the machinery of that apparatus while it was operating.
The prohibition was cumulative: the Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of citizenship; the Dutch occupation extended this through escalating measures — registration, the yellow star, exclusion from public spaces, school segregation, confiscation of bicycles and radios, curfew, and finally call-up notices for "labour service," the euphemism for deportation. Each measure reduced the space in which a Jewish person could exist.
The hiding imposed a second prohibition: silence. For two years, eight people could not speak above a whisper during working hours, could not flush the toilet, could not move furniture, could not let a curtain twitch. Anne was a talkative, physically energetic adolescent, and the enforced stillness suppressed every form of self-expression except writing. The final prohibition was the raid on 4 August 1944 — the deportation, Westerbork, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen. She died of typhus at fifteen, weeks before liberation.
The Strategy
Anne Frank's strategy was the diary itself — the decision to write, and the decision to revise what she had written into a book she intended to publish.
The first decision was a thirteen-year-old's instinct. She began as any articulate girl might — recording friends, crushes, birthday presents. The hiding gave it a subject and a pressure it would not otherwise have had. She named her correspondent "Kitty" and wrote as to a friend, producing the diary's conversational intimacy.
The second decision was more deliberate. After the March 1944 broadcast, she began revising systematically — changing names, editing passages, sharpening observations, removing material she considered too childish. She was selecting and shaping raw material for a future audience. She drafted short stories and essays alongside the diary, telling Kitty she wanted to be a journalist and writer after the war.
The strategy was also the strategy of attention. Anne watched the seven others with relentless observational precision. She noted Pfeffer's nighttime muttering, the van Pelses' quarrels over food, her mother's manner of setting the table. The diary became a practice of consciousness — a way of remaining mentally alive inside a space designed to reduce its inhabitants to survival. Writing was how she kept herself from disappearing into the enforced silence.
The Price and the Legacy
The price was her life. Anne died at Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, of typhus, in starvation and filth. Her sister Margot died days earlier. Her mother Edith had died at Auschwitz in January. Seven of eight annex inhabitants were killed. The diary survived because Miep Gies picked the pages from the ransacked floor and kept them for eleven months.
The price was also the future the diary describes. Anne wrote about wanting to be a journalist, about books she would write. Every plan was destroyed by the raid. The unbearable quality is not the suffering but the hope — the knowledge that the girl making plans on every page will not survive to execute any of them.
The legacy is vast and complicated. The famous line — "in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart" — has been extracted from context and used as consolation. In context, it is a philosophical choice under duress, followed by acknowledgement of the approaching thunder. The diary has sometimes been domesticated into a story about the triumph of the human spirit, when it is about the destruction of a specific human being whose spirit was not enough to save her. What it proved is that a girl of thirteen could write prose of genuine quality under extreme confinement, and that an adolescent's interior life was a fit subject for literature even when the exterior world was organised around her annihilation.
The Reading
The Birthday
The diary begins on Anne's thirteenth birthday, 12 June 1942, with entries that are the diary of a bright Amsterdam schoolgirl. She lists her birthday presents — the red-and-white checked notebook among them — describes her friends, her crushes, the boys who cycle past her on the way to school, her teachers and their eccentricities. She is chatty, opinionated, sharp-eyed, and self-dramatising in the way of a girl who already senses she is the most interesting person in any room she enters. The German occupation is background: the yellow star must be worn, the swimming pool is forbidden, Jews cannot ride trams, Jewish children must attend the Jewish Lyceum. She reports these restrictions as a child reports obstacles — irritating, unfair, bewildering, but the landscape of the world she knows. She has not yet understood that these restrictions are incremental steps in a process designed to reach a destination she cannot imagine.
The entry for 5 July records Margot's call-up notice — the summons that meant deportation. The family moved into hiding the next day. She put on multiple layers of clothing — two vests, three pairs of pants, a dress, a skirt, a jacket, a raincoat — because a suitcase would have been conspicuous on the street. A Jewish girl carrying luggage through Amsterdam in July 1942 would have been stopped.
The Annex
She gives the reader a floor plan of the annex — the steep staircase, the concealed entrance behind the bookcase, the small rooms that will be her world for two years. She describes daily rhythms with the precision of someone who has learned that routine keeps fear manageable: silence during office hours, cooking and bathing at fixed times, the BBC broadcasts Otto listens to in the evenings, deliveries from Miep Gies and the others who risk their lives daily.
The middle portion contains her most remarkable writing. She is thirteen when hiding begins and fifteen when it ends, and these are the years she becomes a writer — not in the sense of someone keeping a diary, but of someone who has discovered that writing is how she thinks. She reads constantly — history, mythology, Dutch literature, biographies — and includes reflections on her reading, attempts at short stories she titles and dates. She fights with her mother, whom she experiences as cold and critical. The fights are rendered with the particular cruelty of adolescence: she knows she is unfair and writes it down anyway, and the honesty — the refusal to make herself likeable — is what makes the diary literature rather than self-presentation. She adores her father, the only person in the annex she trusts completely.
Peter
She develops an increasingly complicated relationship with Peter van Pels — a boy of sixteen, shy, not especially articulate, who offers the thing she cannot get anywhere else: physical proximity to someone her own age, the possibility of a first kiss in an attic room overlooking Amsterdam's rooftops. She writes about these evenings with a self-awareness that is simultaneously touching and devastating: she knows the feelings are partly manufactured by confinement, partly genuine, and she cannot tell the difference because she has no frame of reference for what normal adolescent romance looks like.
She writes about her changing body with a frankness Otto would later censor — passages about menstruation, about desire, about anatomy she is discovering — and about her future as a writer and journalist. She decides what she wants to be. She makes specific, practical plans: she will go to Paris after the war, she will study art history, she will write a book about the annex. The plans are devastatingly concrete. They assume a future the reader knows will not arrive.
The Observation
The diary is remarkable not for the occasional quotable statement but for the sustained quality of its observation. She describes the mannerisms of the other seven with a precision that must have been painful for survivors to read. She notes Pfeffer's nighttime coughing, records Mrs. van Pels's quarrels over vegetables, describes her mother's way of ladling soup, analyses Mr. van Pels picking his teeth. She renders the petty irritations of confinement — the shared bathroom, the rationed food, the arguments over whose turn it is to peel potatoes — with an eye that is simultaneously comic and desperate: these are the details of a life reduced to domestic proximity with seven people in rooms where no one can leave.
She describes the burglary attempts at the warehouse below, the terror of hearing footsteps on the stairs, the nights when anti-aircraft fire shakes the building and she crawls into her father's bed. She records the specific sounds: the Westertoren clock striking every quarter hour, the cats in the attic, the office workers arriving each morning below, unaware.
The fear is always present but never dominates. She handles it by writing about it, giving it a shape on the page that makes it possible to live with. She describes news from outside — deportations, rumours of gas chambers, the fates of friends who did not go into hiding — and processes this information with a maturity almost unbearable to read, because the reader knows what Anne does not: that the rumours are true and that she will be among the victims.
There are also passages of pure adolescent joy — the chestnut tree visible from the attic window, the pleasure of a sunny day glimpsed through dusty glass, the excitement when Miep brings strawberries. Her capacity for happiness under confinement is not naive but defiant. She insists on noticing beauty because the alternative — surrendering her inner life to the fear — would be a capitulation she refuses.
The Last Entry
On 15 July 1944 she writes: "It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." The sentence is less comforting in context: the paragraph describes her fear of the approaching thunder, and the "belief" is a philosophical choice under duress — choosing to believe because the alternative is to concede the point to the machinery that has taken everything from her.
The final entry, dated 1 August 1944, is about the contradiction between her exterior personality — cheerful, flippant, knowing — and the interior self she believes is more serious, and her difficulty letting the interior self appear. "I'm afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side." The entry breaks off mid-thought because the next day's entry was never written: on 4 August, the Gestapo arrived at Prinsengracht 263, led to the concealed entrance behind the bookcase.
The diary survives as the text whose meaning is inseparable from what happened after the last entry. Miep Gies gathered the scattered pages, kept them unread for eleven months until Otto returned alone from Auschwitz. The book is the one piece of Anne Frank the Nazis failed to destroy. She wanted to be a writer. She became one. A girl of thirteen took a red-and-white checked birthday notebook and, in two years of confinement and fear, produced a work of literature that has outlasted the empire that tried to erase her. The notebook survived. The empire did not.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
The Definitive Edition, edited by Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler (Doubleday, 1995), restores passages Otto censored from the original 1947 publication and is the standard text. The Critical Edition (NIOD, 1986/2003) contains all three versions — the original diary, Anne's revised text, and the published edition — for scholars.
Bantam mass market paperback. The most widely available edition.
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