Anne Frank's Diary First Published

Context

During the German occupation of the Netherlands that began in May 1940, Nazi authorities imposed increasingly severe restrictions on the Jewish population, including exclusion from schools, professions, and public life. By 1942, systematic deportations to concentration and extermination camps had begun, prompting many Jewish families to seek concealment. The Frank family, originally from Germany and living in Amsterdam, went into hiding in July 1942 in a secret annex behind Otto Frank’s business premises on the Prinsengracht canal, joined later by the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer.

What Happened

Anne Frank, who turned thirteen on June 12, 1942, received a red-checkered diary as a birthday gift and immediately began recording her experiences, thoughts, and the tensions of communal life in the confined space. She continued writing until August 1, 1944, when the group was betrayed and arrested by Dutch police acting on German orders. After the war, only Otto Frank survived; the others perished in camps. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, office workers who had helped sustain the hidden group, recovered Anne’s papers—including her original diary, a rewritten version she had begun in 1944, and loose stories—and handed them to Otto upon his return to Amsterdam in 1945.

Aftermath

Otto Frank initially hesitated to read the pages but soon recognized their value as a historical document. Encouraged by friends and by a 1946 newspaper column titled “A Child’s Voice” written by historian Jan Romein in Het Parool, Otto compiled a manuscript that combined Anne’s versions while omitting certain passages. Contact Publishing agreed to issue the book, and the first Dutch edition of roughly three thousand copies appeared on June 25, 1947. The modest print run sold out rapidly, prompting a second edition of nearly seven thousand copies before the end of the year.

Legacy

The diary’s rapid translation into German, French, and English in the early 1950s, followed by dozens of additional languages, transformed a personal wartime record into one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust. It has shaped educational curricula, theatrical adaptations, and public memorials across continents, serving as a primary source that emphasizes individual voice and moral reflection over abstract statistics. Successive scholarly editions have clarified Otto Frank’s editorial choices and restored passages he had set aside, reinforcing the text’s status as both literary work and historical evidence.