Notes

The Diary of a Young Girl: The famous story of a Jewish girl who went into hiding during the Second World War - Book by Anne Frank

Discover one of the most heartbreaking and inspiring stories from World War II.

The Diary of a Young Girl tells the incredible story of the years the Frank family and four other people lived together in hiding, unable to set foot outside. Through the first-hand account of an incredibly insightful and talented young writer, Anne Frank, it reveals just how fragile that life is but also how meaningful and inspirational it can end up being.

There is a reason millions of people every year travel to Amsterdam to visit the building where Anne Frank stayed. Her diary was one of the most powerful books published in the twentieth century. It reveals the thoughts and aspirations of one young Jewish girl and gives us a profound sense of what was lost during the war.

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From Schoolgirl to Girl in Hiding.

The first entry in Anne Frank’s diary is from June 12, 1942 – her thirteenth birthday. It reads: “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone . . .” The diary was a gift she’d just received. In it, she noted the day’s other gifts: a new blouse, flowers, a puzzle, a voucher for two books.

There were other small birthday presents and humble tokens of love. Anne admits that she felt a bit spoiled by her parents in those days before the family went into hiding. That summer, in 1942, the family – Anne, her parents, and her older sister, Margot – were living in Amsterdam, where her father worked as a director for the Dutch Opekta Company, a manufacturer of spices and other food-related products.

The early private thoughts that Anne devoted to her diary were primarily concerned with school, friends, and classmates. But, from the start, it was clear that Anne has a sharp mind and that her concerns run deep. 

On June 20, 1942, she wrote down a saying: “Paper has more patience than people.” In the same entry, she writes about false appearances. Outwardly, it might look like she has it all, but, deep down, she feels lonely. She doesn’t have a true friend to open up to. 

She also writes about the stress that Hitler’s recent anti-Jewish laws have put on the family. As she explains, the pogroms of 1938 had forced Jewish people to wear yellow stars and made it illegal to ride bicycles, use cars or trams, or engage in any sport or athletics in public. They were only allowed to shop between the hours of 3:00 and 5:00 p.m. They couldn’t go to the movies or see plays. The rules were so numerous that it was hard to keep track of them all.

But, in June, Anne wrote most about less weighty matters: her battles with teachers who thought she was a chatterbox, her impending grades in class, her budding relationship with a suitor named Hello Silberberg (Hello being short for Helmuth), and her love for a boy named Peter Schiff.

That all changed on the first Sunday of July. The Frank family received what was known as a call-up notice from the SS. Everyone knew the meaning of these notices: the person being called up would likely be headed to a cell, or worse, a concentration camp. At first, Anne thought the notice was for her father. But she soon found out the truth – it was for Margot, her sister.

A rapid sequence of events unfolded, which found the Frank family quickly packing all the belongings they could and giving other items to friends for safekeeping. They were going into hiding.

The secret location was at the back of the top two floors in the Opekta building where her father worked, at 263 Prinsengracht. An unassuming door on the second floor of the offices unexpectedly led to what is now known as the Secret Annex.

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The Secret Annex.

The Franks were not alone in the Secret Annex. A week after moving in, they were joined by the van Daans, as they’re called in the diary. (Anne used pseudonyms.) This family had three members: Mr. and Mrs. van Daan, and their teenage son, Peter. Mr. van Daan was a colleague of Otto Frank, Anne’s father. 

A few select people at Opekta knew about the annex and its occupants, including Mr. Kleiman and Mr. Kugler, who ran the business, and two secretaries, Hermine and Elizabeth. Anne calls them Miep and Bep. These people would regularly check in with the Franks and van Daans; they were the families’ only connection to the outside world, bringing in food, books, and other supplies.

Let’s explain the living conditions in more detail. Once it became a place of hiding, the door to the Secret Annex was hidden by a bookcase that was mounted to the wall. Beyond that door was a steep set of stairs that led to two rooms: Mr. and Mrs. Frank’s room and, next to that, Anne and Margot’s. On this same floor was a lavatory, as well as another small room containing nothing but a sink.

Further up, at the top of the stairs, was the third and final floor of the building: a large room with a gas cooker and a sink. This was the kitchen, a general living room and study for everyone, as well as the bedroom for Mr. and Mrs. van Daan. A small side room contained a bed for Peter. Finally, on this top floor, there was also a loft attic space where supplies could be kept. 

It wasn’t a horribly cramped living space – Anne was well aware that there may not have been a more comfortable hiding place in all of the Netherlands – but it wasn’t easy living there either. There were strict rules. Anne and her father quickly went to work stitching together blackout curtains for the windows, which needed to stay closed for as long as they could bear it. Looking out the window was forbidden. Water use and flushing the toilet needed to be done at off-hours so that the workers below wouldn’t hear the drain being used. Too much noise at the wrong time, be it the radio or a coughing fit, could mean disaster.

It goes without saying that no one in the annex could ever set foot outside. So, while everyone was grateful for their lopsided and damp living conditions, no one was immune to the ever-present sense of fear that could, at any moment, set the whole place on edge. 

As Anne wrote, only a couple of months after moving in, two things weighed heavily on her: not being able to go outside and the fear that, at any moment, they could be discovered and shot on sight.

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Close Quarters, Different Opinions.

There was, of course, little privacy in the annex. Really, the best one could hope for was a stolen moment in the lavatory. Anne’s time spent writing in her diary was often a moment of solitude and peace of mind. Many of her entries speak to the challenges everyone faced by having to spend so much time together.

On July 12, a month after Anne’s birthday, she wrote about how she felt a distance growing between her and her mother and sister. She described her beloved father as the only one who understood her at all. With the others, she felt like she didn’t fit in; they were always picking on her, underestimating her, and treating her unfairly.

Margot once broke the vacuum cleaner by yanking the cord when she tried to unplug it. The accident blew the light fuse, sending the annex into darkness for the rest of the day. But the only scolding she got was being told that she should have known better. Yet, when Anne tried to fix her mother’s illegible handwriting on the shopping list, the whole family ganged up and told her off.

Anne notes that her family talked about how well they got along with each other. But no one seemed to give a second thought to how Anne really felt about the family dynamic.

At first, Anne was looking forward to July 13, the day the van Daans were scheduled to arrive. And, in the first few weeks, her anticipation wasn’t disappointed. The two families merged seamlessly. Anne didn’t think much of Peter early on, finding him too shy to be of much interest. But Mrs. van Daan was a source of amusement from the very beginning. She arrived carrying a hat box. Inside it was a chamberpot. Her explanation: “I just don’t feel at home without my chamber pot.”

But there was often tension between these two new residents. Mr. and Mrs. van Daan argued so often, and about such trivial matters, that it seemed to be a standard part of their relationship.

More awkward, however, was the friction between Mrs. van Daan and Mrs. Frank. At the heart of some early disagreements were Mrs. van Daan’s disapproval of modern parenting methods, such as letting teenagers read books meant for adults or how “modest and retiring” a young woman should be. 

When Mrs. Frank agreed with Mr. van Daan’s belief that being modest and retiring won’t get you far in the world, Mrs. van Daan felt it her duty to speak up. She had the amusing habit of blushing bright red when aggravated – and on this occasion, she did just that. She railed against such modern child-rearing ideas as advising Anne against being modest and retiring. The most hilarious thing about this argument was that Mrs. van Daan was going out of her way to insist that she was extremely modest and not pushy at all, completely oblivious to how her actions were contradicting her words at that very moment. Mrs. Frank couldn’t help but laugh, which just turned Mrs. van Daan even more red in the face.

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Food and Medicine.

Living in close quarters with the same people, day after day, comes with unavoidable tensions. But there were other daily factors that could make life even more anxious and uncertain. Food and health, in particular, were two constant concerns over which the families had little control.

Early on, in late October 1942, Anne’s father came down with what appeared to be measles. This brought into renewed focus the precariousness of their situation. There was no doctor they could go to. Anne could only hope that her mother’s remedy – helping her father sweat it out – would do the trick. Coughs, colds, measles, influenza. As time went on, illness of any kind was cause for real concern. Medicines like aspirin, codeine, and valerian drops were precious commodities.

Food, on the other hand, could be both unvarying and unpredictable. It wasn’t uncommon for an abundance of one or two ingredients to become the feature of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Potatoes, in one form or another, were often a feature of every meal – and they were sometimes pretty rotten.

During one particularly dire stretch, the best vegetable they could get was lettuce. So it was lettuce day and night: boiled lettuce, raw lettuce, lettuce served with rotten, sickly tasting potatoes.

The Franks and van Daans used black-market ration coupons to pay for this food, but the price of ration books varied dramatically. Faithful friends were willing to obtain and transport the food back to the families, but money was a constant concern.

Birthdays and holidays were among the few exceptions. On such occasions, they indulged a little. People in the annex would save up some of their sugar to bake something sweet or put away a pot of yogurt as a present. Bep and Miep would arrive with food gifts as well, like a bottle of beer for each of the adults.

Of course, getting food came with other risks, too. Hauling a 50-pound bag of beans up a staircase is no easy feat. And when that bag tears and those 50 pounds of beans go spilling down the steps, the noise it makes is loud enough to rattle your bones. An entry on November 9, 1942, describes this exact occurrence, where a bag Peter was carrying to the attic broke and sent a wave of beans cascading down the stairs.

Others in the house thought the building was falling to pieces, and they were picking up stray beans for days to come. Fortunately, the bean incident didn’t raise any other alarms. And Mr. Frank was feeling better by mid-November – just in time for the arrival of yet another annex resident.

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Meet Mr. Dussel

In November, after a few months in the Secret Annex, everyone agreed that there was room for one more person. There were, God knew, countless people in desperate need of refuge. So the van Daans and the Franks put their heads together to determine who that person should be.

After some deliberation, it was decided that the opportunity be given to Albert Dussel, a dentist. He was quiet and pleasant – the kind of man who would fit in with the rest of the residents. Margot moved upstairs, out of the room she'd shared with Anne, and onto a foldout bed. Mr. Dussel would be taking her place.

Mr. Dussel arrived around November 17. When he entered the annex, he was met with an amazing sight: the Franks and the van Daans, gathered around the dinner table, welcoming him into the fold with a cup of coffee and cognac. As Dussel reported, everyone believed the cover story the Franks had left behind – that they’d managed to cross the border and were somewhere in Belgium. Once his wonder had passed, he shared news of numerous friends who’d been taken away by the SS. They go around every night, carrying lists, he told them. They go door-to-door, asking for certain people by name and taking entire families away.

From the annex, Anne herself had witnessed lines of people rounded up by the SS. Men, women, children, the ailing, and elderly – all were marched down the street. Some of them were beaten along the way until they could hardly continue.

Anne wrote about how some days she’d catch herself laughing and feel pangs of guilt about it. How could she laugh when friends were likely dead or in horrible situations? Yet how could she lie in bed and cry all day? No matter what she did, anxieties about her own fate and the fate of others were not far from her mind. But she had to resist turning the Secret Annex into the Melancholy Annex. 

As it turned out, Mr. Dussel wasn’t as pleasant as he’d seemed. Everything was fine for the first few days, but then he showed his true colors: he was a disciplinarian and lecturer. He even took to providing Mrs. Frank with regular, unsolicited reports on Anne's bad behavior. After being admonished by Mr. Dussel, there was one thing she could count on: being admonished yet again by her mother. Anne took to calling Mr. Dussel, "His Excellency.“

At night, Anne was left to “ponder her many sins and exaggerated shortcomings.” She was left with such a list that she was unsure of whether to laugh or cry. She was well aware that she was not perfect and was keen to work on her character. But the constant nitpicking, coming at her from all sides, seemed unfair. Not all was bad, however: Hanukkah and St. Nicholas Day were only a week away.

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A Noise in the Night

The annex residents lived with two constant fears. The first was making too much noise during the day and having one of the warehouse workers hear something and get curious. The second was burglars.

As the war dragged on, the city of Amsterdam became the site of more and more break-ins. People were afraid to leave their houses since it was becoming increasingly possible that your belongings might not be there when you got back. Of course, a business like Opetka, with its offices and warehouse sitting quietly apart from any residential buildings, was a target for more than one break-in.

One of the first break-ins was around March 25, 1943. It was nighttime, and Peter went downstairs to whisper something to Mr. Frank about a barrel falling down and the sound of someone trying to open the warehouse door. 

Of course, on this night, Mr. van Daan was also nursing a bad cough. So, while Peter and Mr. Frank tiptoed downstairs to try and get a better idea of what was going on in the warehouse, everyone else was trying not to panic each time Mr. van Daan let out a loud cough. Eventually, someone had the brilliant idea of giving Mr. van Daan some codeine, which immediately quieted things down.

Anne was petrified, fearing that Peter and her father wouldn’t return, but return they did. It seems the sound of feet going down the stairs was enough to scare off the burglars at the door. But it wasn’t the last such scare.

On Sunday, May 2, 1943, Anne wrote about how every day came with some sort of heightened tension, whether it was noises coming from within the building or guns and bombs going off outside. 

The bombing and the guns only got worse as the war raged month after month. The summer of 1943 was broiling hot as well. Yet the annex residents had to continue burning their rubbish, lest there be evidence for the warehouse employees to possibly discover.

To keep her mind off the troubles, Anne wrote. And not just in her diary. Anne was also working on stories. In particular, she was proud of a fairytale called “Eva’s Dream,” while another piece called “Cady’s Life” she judged as having some good parts but was altogether “nothing special.” Indeed, she was already beginning to suspect that her vocation might be journalism. Even if she couldn’t support herself as a writer, she intended to continue writing in her spare time.

What she couldn’t abide was thinking that she might lead a life like her mother or Mrs. van Daan – women who “go about their work and are forgotten.” Anne was feeling that writing was her God-given talent and that she would use it to express herself and make a difference in the world.

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Young Love in the Annex.

When reading through the numerous beautifully written and empathetic diary entries, it’s impossible not to see that Anne was maturing rapidly in the Secret Annex. This maturity goes beyond the fact that she got her first period while in hiding. As her writing attests, she was constantly reflecting on her character and striving to adopt a more thoughtful and considerate approach to life, even under the extraordinary circumstances she found herself in.

During the winter of 1943 and into 1944, she was even becoming more understanding toward Mrs. van Daan and her own parents. Maybe, if you were not unreasonable and showed a little patience, Mrs. van Daan wasn’t so hard to come to terms with. And even though Anne struggled to see her mother as the role model she wanted her to be, she learned to be less negative and more appreciative of everything her parents had tried to provide her with. Indeed, she began to see her own behavior as part of the problem in her strained relationship with her mother.

But it was also a time of sexual maturity for Anne. In particular, there was Peter. This boy, who at first seemed little more than a lazy bore, gradually became a person of intense interest to Anne. It started with some small conversations, some of them instigated by Mouschi, a cat that lived in the attic and provided the house with no shortage of fleas. Peter enjoyed looking after the cat, and Anne began to see him as a more complex person, someone unfairly caught between two combative parents; someone who needed a sympathetic ear; someone like Anne.

Anne was convinced that Peter regarded her as an immature chatterbox, just as everyone else did. On January 6, 1944, she wrote about how she longed for Peter to do what she did and look past the superficial impressions to see the complex human underneath. She told her diary about looking into his eyes and seeing past the flicker of masculinity and uncovering a shyness and uncertainty that melted her heart.

But she wasn’t in love with Peter. At least, not then. The evolution of their relationship was slow. First, they sat together in the attic. Then they sat next to each other, arms around each other’s backs. It became easier to talk to him about anything, especially at night. The moonglow and whispers made it easier to confide to one another than the harsh light of day.

But how the days crawled by! Sometimes it all seemed so unbearably slow. In April, she confessed to her diary that she longed to kiss him. Did Peter feel the same, or did he think of her as only a friend? It’d been 21 months in the annex at that point, but finally, on April 16, 1944, Anne experienced her first real kiss. It was, as she put it, “a red-letter day.” Now there was just the matter of explaining their relationship to their parents.

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Two Sides of Anne.

Along with her creative writing and her regular diary entries, Anne still kept up with her studies during her time in the Secret Annex. This included learning French and English and the dreaded subject of algebra. She loved reading about history most of all and was fascinated with genealogical charts. She even read a massive 598-page book on Charles V, alongside a 320-page book on Galileo. But what she really longed for was to go back to school.

On June 6, 1944, that glorious prospect seemed closer than ever. On the radio, a voice announced, “This is D-Day.” The invasion of the Allied forces had finally begun. After two long years in hiding, it was a day everyone had been waiting for. 

A week later, Anne celebrated her fifteenth birthday. By the end of June, spirits were high. Parts of France were being captured by the Allies. Then came the strawberries, mountains of them, delivered to the annex all at once. Strawberries with porridge for breakfast, strawberries with buttermilk and bread, strawberries preserved in jars. 

Oh, and 20 pounds of pea pods arrived as well, which Anne and others had to work round the clock at peeling. “Snap the end, strip the pod, pull the string, pod in the pan, snap the end, strip the pod . . .” and on and on it went. They were all seasick by the time they finished, and Anne was more confident than ever in her determination never to become a housewife.

Meanwhile, things with Peter were leveling off. There were goodnight kisses and a mutual love between the two, but it was ending up more as a friendship. Anne was getting discouraged by the limitations Peter was seemingly placing upon himself. This laziness she’d noticed in him earlier on reappeared, and Anne couldn’t understand it. Peter joked about turning to a life of crime after the war. This didn’t sit well with Anne.

She couldn’t wrap her head around why people would settle for whatever was easy or give in to their weaknesses without a fight. Anne knew she had her own weaknesses, but that only made her more determined to change and work on overcoming them.

On August 1, 1944, Anne wrote that she still saw herself as split in two. The lighthearted, flippant, cheerful Anne that people didn’t take seriously, and the deeper, better, nicer Anne that froze up whenever put on the spot. People might not see much of this deeper Anne, but she was the one guiding her. This was the change Anne was working very hard on, to bring this quiet and good part of herself to the outside.

Her diary ends on this moment of self-reflection, amid these plans for self-betterment. On August 4, 1944, a car of SS officials arrived at 263 Prinsengracht and arrested everyone in the Secret Annex, as well as Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, who’d been helping the families. The two secretaries, Miep Gies and Elizabeth Voskuijl, were not arrested.

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A Book to Change the World.

Miep Gies went up to the annex immediately after everyone was taken away and managed to salvage some items, including Anne’s diary. She hoped to return it to Anne once the war was over.

The eight members of the Secret Annex were first taken to a prison in Amsterdam before being sent to a transit camp in Westerbrook, in the northern Netherlands. On September 3, 1944, they were placed on a train to Auschwitz. It was the last transport to leave Westerbrook.

At Auschwitz, the families were split up. Mrs. van Daan, whose real name was Petronella van Pels, was sent from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, and then to at least two other camps before she died. Mr. van Daan, real name Hermann van Pels, died at Auschwitz. He was gassed in October or November of 1944, not long before the gas chambers were put out of use. Peter van Pels was part of the “death march” from Auschwitz to the Mauthausen camp in Austria. He died there on March 5, 1945, three days before the Allied forces arrived at the camp. Fritz Pfeffer, the real name of Albert Dussel, died on December 20, 1944, at the Neuengamme camp.

Anne’s mother, Edith Frank, died of starvation and exhaustion at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp on January 6, 1945. Margot and Anne were not separated. They were sent from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen camp in late October 1944. They died the following winter, days apart from one another, due to an outbreak of typhus that had ravaged the camp. It is believed that their bodies were placed in a mass grave at the site. British soldiers would liberate the camp on April 12, 1945.

The only surviving member of the annex was Anne’s father, Otto Frank. He lived to see Russian troops arrive at Auschwitz and returned to Amsterdam on June 3, 1945. While he knew of his wife’s fate, he’d hoped that he might be reunited with Anne and Margot. Instead, he was met by Miep Gies, who handed the diary to Otto, saying, “Here is your daughter’s legacy to you.”

It wasn’t easy for Otto to rediscover his daughter through her personal writings. As he described in his own memoirs, he could only read one or two pages a day without becoming overwhelmed with emotion. But what he did read astounded him. He still thought of Anne as a child, but here in her writings was proof that she was a far more complex and thoughtful young woman, capable of profound writing. 

At first, he believed that only a few other family and friends should have access to Anne’s writings, but then he had a change of heart. In her diary, Anne speculates about one day publishing a book called The Secret Annex. So Otto began sending copies of the diary to publishers. Many rejected the book, but it managed to receive a small printing, under the title The Secret Annex, in June 1947. It wasn’t until 1952, when the book was published in America, that the diary became an international sensation.

Since then, it’s constantly been in print and has been turned into theater and film productions. Her story has inspired generations of people to stand against the atrocities of war and to fight for human rights. Anne never gave up on the idea that human kindness would finally win in the end.

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From 1942 to 1944, Anne Frank spent just over two years in hiding with her parents, her older sister Margot, and the van Pels family, which included Mr. and Mrs. van Pels, and their teenage son Peter. After a few months, the eighth and final member of the Secret Annex arrived, the dentist Fritz Pfeffer. Though Anne had her share of tensions with many of her cohabitants, she quickly matured during her time in hiding. From the start, she felt a distance between herself and her family members, but she came to take a good share of the responsibility for that distance and strove to better herself. She kept up her studies and even fell in love with Peter, all while living under the constant threat of having their hiding spot exposed. Through it all, Anne never gave up hope. And though her life met a tragic end, her dreams of being an influential writer came true.