The posthumously published diary of Anne Frank is world famous.
There are over 40 million copies printed in 70 languages all detailing the inner thoughts of the “inquisitive and in many respects precocious”, Jewish 13-year-old, who was kept in hiding/captivity with her family during Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.
The black and white photos of a young Anne Frank along with her diary helped her to become a worldwide symbol of the Holocaust.
It’s easy to forget this would-be-journalist was only 13-years-old, but two newly uncovered pages of the famous Anne Frank Diary remind us of this teenager’s more human side.
The hidden text was across two pages
The hidden pages were covered up with brown gummed paper, but new technology has allowed researchers to reveal four “dirty” jokes and 33 lines about sex education and prostitution, adjacent to five, crossed out phrases according to the Anne Frank House.
The Anne Frank House alongside Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands presented the diary findings at a press conference this week.
“I sometimes imagine that someone might come to me and ask me to inform him about sexual matters,” Anne Frank wrote on the pages.
“How would I go about it?”
Anne then attempts to explain sex to an imaginary person, using the information she’s learnt from her father, a friend and books.
Her father is also the central source of inspiration for her dirty jokes, and Anne also refers to him visiting a “big house” of prostitution in Paris.
Anne published two version’s of her diary, these pages were found in the first copy, intended only for her self. She would later write a book based on her diary called “The Secret Annex”, which she’d hoped would be published after the war.
Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp three months before her 16th birthday, in 1945.
