Secrets of Anne Frank’s diary revealed
Researchers using digital technology have deciphered the writing on two pages of Anne Frank’s diary that she had pasted over with brown masking paper, discovering four naughty jokes and a candid explanation of sex, contraception and prostitution.
“Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile,” said Frank van Vree, director of the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
“The dirty jokes are classics among growing children. They make it clear that Anne, with all her gifts, was above all also an ordinary girl.”
Anne, aged 13 at the time, wrote the two pages on September 28, 1942, less than three months after she, her family and another Jewish family went into hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex behind a canal-side house in Amsterdam.
Later on, possibly fearing prying eyes or no longer liking what she had written, she covered them over with brown paper with an adhesive backing like a postage stamp, and their content remained a tantalising mystery for decades.
It turns out the pages contained four jokes about sex that Anne herself described as “dirty” and an explana- tion of women’s sexual development, sex, contraception and prostitution.
“They bring us even closer to the girl and the writer Anne Frank,” said Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House museum.
Experts on Anne’s multimillionselling diary said the newly discovered text, when studied with the rest of her journal, reveals more about her development as a writer than it does about her interest in sex.
The institutions involved in the latest research said that because of copyright issues, it is unclear whether the passages will be incorporated into new editions.