Technology reveals more of diary

AMSTERDAM (AP) — Researchers using digital technology 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, age 13 at the time, wrote the two pages on Sept. 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 tantalizing mystery for decades.

Experts on Anne’s multimillion-selling 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.

Anne wrote candidly in other parts of her diary about her burgeoning sexuality, her anatomy and her impending period.

Leopold said the newly deciphered material provides an early example of how Anne “creates a fictional situation that makes it easier for her to address the sensitive topics that she writes about.” In her diary, for example, she addressed entries to a fictional friend named Kitty.

Researchers photographed the pages, backlit by a flash, and then used image-processing software to decipher the words, which were hard to read because they were jumbled up with the writing on the reverse sides of the pages.

Anne wrote her diary while she and her family hid for more than two years during World War II. The family went into hiding in July 1942 and remained there, provided with essentials by a close-knit group of helpers, until Aug. 4, 1944, when they were discovered and ultimately deported to Auschwitz.

Only Anne’s father, Otto Frank, survived the war. Anne and her sister died in Bergen-Belsen camp. Anne was 15.

AP photo Teresien da Silva and Ronald Leopold of the Anne Frank Foundation show a facsimile of Anne Frank’s diary in Amsterdam on Tuesday. Researchers have used digital photo techniques to uncover the text on two pages that the teenage Jewish diarist had...