The Diary of a Young Girl facts for kids
_-_front_cover,_first_edition.jpg)
1948 first edition
|
|
| Author | Anne Frank |
|---|---|
| Original title | Het Achterhuis (The Annex) |
| Translator | B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday |
| Cover artist | Helmut Salden |
| Country | Netherlands |
| Language | Dutch |
| Subject |
|
| Genre | Autobiography, Coming of Age, Jewish literature |
| Publisher | Contact Publishing |
|
Publication date
|
25 June 1947 |
|
Published in English
|
1952 |
| Awards | Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century |
| OCLC | 1432483 |
| 949.207 | |
| LC Class | DS135.N6 |
The Diary of a Young Girl is a diary written in Dutch by Anne Frank. She began it in 1942, writing secretly to an imaginary friend. She wrote it while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was caught in 1944 and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, the diary was found by Anne's father, Otto Frank. He was the only known survivor of the family. The diary has now been published in more than 60 different languages. It is now considered a classic of war literature. The diary was rescued from a reject pile by cookbook publisher Judith Jones.
It was first published as Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 12 juni 1942 – 1 augustus 1944 (The Annex: Diary Notes from 12 June 1942 – 1 August 1944) by Contact Publishing in Amsterdam in 1947. After it was translated into English as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Doubleday & Company (United States) and Valentine Mitchell (United Kingdom) in 1952, it became very famous critically. It became very popular, and the 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank and movie version were both based on the diary. The play was first acted in New York City. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1956. The book is in several lists of the top books of the twentieth century. It discusses the themes of sharing and selfishness in the war, about how someone can be different on the inside and the outside, and about the loneliness of growing up.
The copyright of the Dutch version of the diary, published in 1947, expired on 1 January 2016, seventy years after the author's death, as a result of a general rule in copyright law of the European Union. Following this, the original Dutch version was made available online.
Contents
Background
During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Anne Frank received a blank diary as one of her presents on 12 June 1942, her 13th birthday. According to the Anne Frank House, the red, checkered autograph book which Anne used as her diary was actually not a surprise, since she had chosen it the day before with her father when browsing a bookstore near her home. She entered a one-sentence note on her birthday, writing "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." The main diary was written from 14 June.
On 5 July 1942, Anne's older sister Margot received an official summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany, and on 6 July, Margot and Anne went into hiding with their parents Otto and Edith. They were later joined by Hermann van Pels, Otto's business partner, including his wife Auguste and their teenage son Peter. Their hiding place was in the sealed-off upper rooms of the annex at the back of Otto's company building in Amsterdam. Otto Frank started his business, named Opekta, in 1933. He was licensed to manufacture and sell pectin, a substance used to make jam. He stopped running his business while in hiding. But once he returned in the summer of 1945, he found his employees running it. The rooms that everyone hid in were concealed behind a movable bookcase in the same building as Opekta. The dentist of helper Miep Gies, Fritz Pfeffer, joined them four months later. In the published version, names were changed: The van Pelses are known as the Van Daans, and Fritz Pfeffer as Albert Dussel. With the assistance of a group of Otto Frank's trusted colleagues, they remained hidden for two years and one month.
On 4 August 1944, they were discovered and deported to Nazi concentration camps. They were long thought to have been betrayed, although there are indications that their discovery may have been accidental, that the police raid had actually targeted "ration fraud". Of the eight people, only Otto Frank survived the war. Anne was 15 years old when she died in Bergen-Belsen. The exact date of her death is unknown, and has long been believed to be in late February or early March, a few weeks before the prisoners were liberated by British troops on 15 April 1945.
In the manuscript, her original diaries are written over three extant volumes. The first volume (the red-and-white checkered autograph book) covers the period between 14 June and 5 December 1942. Since the second surviving volume (a school exercise book) begins on 22 December 1943, and ends on 17 April 1944, it is assumed that the original volume or volumes between December 1942 and December 1943 were lost, presumably after the arrest, when the hiding place was emptied on Nazi instructions. However, this missing period is covered in the version Anne rewrote for preservation. The third existing volume (which was also a school exercise book) contains entries from 17 April to 1 August 1944, when Anne wrote for the last time three days before her arrest.
The manuscript, written on loose sheets of paper, was found strewn on the floor of the hiding place by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl after the family's arrest, but before their rooms were ransacked by a special department of the Amsterdam office of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, Nazi intelligence agency) for which many Dutch collaborators worked. The papers were given to Otto Frank after the war, when Anne's death was confirmed in July 1945 by sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, who were with Margot and Anne in Bergen-Belsen.
Format
The diary is not written in the classic forms of "Dear Diary" or as letters to oneself; Anne calls her diary "Kitty", so almost all of the letters are written to Kitty. Anne used the above-mentioned names for her annex-mates in the first volume, from 25 September 1942 until 13 November 1942, when the first notebook ends. It is believed that these names were taken from characters found in a series of popular Dutch books written by Cissy van Marxveldt.
Anne's already budding literary ambitions were galvanized on 29 March 1944 when she heard a London radio broadcast made by the exiled Dutch Minister for Education, Art, and Science, Gerrit Bolkestein, calling for the preservation of "ordinary documents – a diary, letters ... simple everyday material" to create an archive for posterity as testimony to the suffering of civilians during the Nazi occupation. On 20 May 1944, she notes that she started re-drafting her diary with future readers in mind. She expanded entries and standardized them by addressing all of them to Kitty, clarified situations, prepared a list of pseudonyms, and cut scenes she thought would be of little interest or too intimate for general consumption. By the time she started the second existing volume, she was writing only to Kitty.
Publication in English
In 1950, the Dutch translator Rosey E. Pool made a first English translation of the diary, which was never published. At the end of 1950, another translator was found to produce an English-language version. Barbara Mooyaart-Doubleday was contracted by Vallentine Mitchell in England, and by the end of the following year, her translation was submitted, now including the deleted passages at Otto Frank's request. As well, Judith Jones, while working for the publisher Doubleday, read and recommended the Diary, pulling it out of the rejection pile. Jones recalled that she came across Frank's work in a slush pile of material that had been rejected by other publishers; she was struck by a photograph of the girl on the cover of an advance copy of the French edition. "I read it all day", she noted. "When my boss returned, I told him, 'We have to publish this book.' He said, 'What? That book by that kid?'" She brought the diary to the attention of Doubleday's New York office. "I made the book quite important because I was so taken with it, and I felt it would have a real market in America. It's one of those seminal books that will never be forgotten", Jones said. The book appeared in the United States and in the United Kingdom in 1952, becoming a best-seller. The introduction to the English publication was written by Eleanor Roosevelt.
In 1989, an English edition of this appeared under the title of The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition, including Mooyaart-Doubleday's translation and Anne Frank's versions A and B, based on the Dutch critical version of 1986. A new translation by Susan Massotty, based on the original texts, was published in 1995.
Other languages
The work was translated in 1950 into German and French, before it appeared in 1952 in the US in English. The critical version was also translated into Chinese. As of 2019, the website of the Anne Frank House records translations in over 70 languages.
Related pages
- , Jon Blair, 1995. (DVD)
Images for kids
-
Stage set for the 2014 theatre production Anne at Theater Amsterdam, with the Secret Annex re-constructed on the right.
-
Facsimile of the diary of Anne Frank on display at the Anne Frank Zentrum in Berlin, Germany
See also
In Spanish: Diario de Ana Frank para niños
