The Diary of a Young Girl

I first read The Diary of a Young Girl in a school paperback with a cracked spine, probably fourteen years old, and I remember coming away with two wrong ideas. The first was that it was a book about victims. The second was that Anne Frank was a saint. Rereading it as an adult, I found something much livelier: a funny, vain, sharp-tongued girl who argued with everyone in the house and happened to be doing it in a hiding place. What follows is the whole plot, twists and the ending included.

Going into hiding

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt on June 12, 1929, into a prosperous German Jewish family. Her father Otto moved the family to Amsterdam in 1933, after Hitler took power, to run a business selling pectin for jam. When the Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940 the escape route closed. Anti-Jewish rules arrived in waves: yellow stars, curfews, no trains, no parks, no cinemas, confiscation of property. On July 5, 1942, Anne's sister Margot received a call-up notice for a labor camp. The family had been preparing for this. The next morning they walked to the hiding place, wearing layers of clothes, leaving a note suggesting they had fled to Switzerland. Anne was thirteen, and she had to leave her cat, Moortje, behind.

The eight occupants

The hiding place was the upper floors and attic behind the building at Prinsengracht 263, where Otto Frank's company had its offices. The entrance was a swinging bookcase. The plan was for four people. Within weeks the van Daan family arrived: Hermann, Auguste, and their sixteen-year-old son Peter. In November a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer joined, known in the diary as Albert Dussel, bringing the total to eight. Below them worked a handful of employees who did not know what was upstairs. Above them sat an attic room where Anne would sit for hours with a pencil.

Anne introduces each of them with the merciless specificity of a teenager. Her father is the man who can do no wrong. Her mother, Edith, is the woman who smothers her with worry. Margot, her older sister, is quiet, clever, and endlessly compared favorably to Anne. Mrs van Daan is vain, childish, and fond of the family stores of butter and brandy. Mr van Daan is a snob who calculates their money. Peter is a slouching, sensitive boy who keeps his room tidy. Dussel arrives with his medicine chest and his rigid habits and immediately annoys her.

Daily life and the radio

Two years and a month without stepping outside. The rules were strict: no running water during office hours, no loud voices, no walking barefoot, no opening windows after dark. They lived around a schedule built from other people's working hours. Mornings were quiet, then the radio, then the endless business of food. Anne records every gram of butter and every black market deal, because in the annex food was the closest thing to currency.

The radio was their most prized possession. They hid it during searches and listened to BBC broadcasts, to news of Stalingrad and the Allied advance, to speeches that told them what was happening in a world they could no longer enter. One broadcast in March 1944 asked Dutch citizens to send in diaries and letters for a postwar archive. Anne heard it and decided she would write a book.

Kitty and the writing

Anne addressed the diary to Kitty, a fictional friend she named after a character from a Dutch girls' novel. Writing to a person, rather than to a blank page, was what gave her permission to say everything. She could be petty, then reflective, then cruel about her own mother, all in the same evening, because Kitty was not judging her.

When the postwar book idea arrived, Anne went back and began revising. She reorganized entries, cut repetition, expanded scenes, and polished sentences. Some of the diary we read is therefore not a raw outburst but a draft. Her father, who had scribbled notes in the margins of an early version, was not thrilled. Anne noticed. The writing habit is what saved her voice from the anonymity of so many other diaries that never survived.

Peter and her mother

The emotional center of the annex, for Anne, was not the war but these two relationships. Her bond with Peter van Daan grew slowly from teasing into something tender. She visited his room in the attic, they sat together in the evening light, and she allowed herself to imagine a romance. Then she grew impatient with his passivity. In one of the most honest passages she admits that she loves the idea of Peter more than Peter himself.

Her relationship with her mother is harder to read. Edith is anxious, protective, and constantly worried, and Anne experiences this as smothering. She writes that her mother does not understand her, that Margot is the perfect daughter, that she, Anne, is the difficult one. It is a painful portrait, made more painful by the knowledge that Edith was doing her best under unbearable pressure. Anne's ability to write about her own unkindness is one of the reasons the diary reads as literature rather than testimony.

The helpers

None of the eight would have survived two months without the people downstairs. Miep Gies, an Austrian-born clerk who had once worked with Otto, bought food on ration coupons that were never issued to the annex, brought news, and sat with Anne in the evenings. Bep Voskuijl, the youngest of the staff, ran errands and later destroyed papers. Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman handled the business side and the money. Four people knew, and four people risked a death sentence every day for two years. Anne understood this. In her entries the helpers appear as lifelines and as reminders that the boundary between the hiding place and the street was a bookcase and a group of brave employees.

There was also ordinary human failure inside the building. In January 1944 two of the staff broke into the annex's supply cupboard and stole food and cash. The incident poisoned the atmosphere for weeks, because it proved that even the trusted circle below could not be fully trusted. Anne writes about it with the anger of someone whose own household was already arguing about a tin of beans.

Version A and Version B

Once the radio broadcast in March 1944 promised a postwar archive, Anne began what amounted to two parallel texts. Version A is the diary as she first wrote it, entry by entry, with all its immediacy. Version B is her revision, written on loose sheets, addressed uniformly to Kitty, with scenes expanded and passages she considered clumsy rewritten for readers she now believed she would have. She was fifteen, and she was editing herself into a writer.

This is the part of the story that separates the diary from simple testimony. Anne was not only recording the annex, she was shaping it, testing which details carried weight. Otto worked from Version B, which is why the published book has a smoother, more reflective texture than the raw notebooks. The critical edition of 1986 printed both, and reading them side by side is the closest a reader can get to watching a real literary intelligence form under impossible conditions.

The arguments and the arrest

Living with eight people in a small space produced constant friction. Butter went missing and was blamed on the wrong person. Mrs van Daan accused Mrs Frank. Dussel complained about Anne's behavior. Otto mediated. There were quarrels about money, about smoking, about who got the last egg. These scenes are the most domestic and the most revealing, because they show that hiding is not a single dramatic act but thousands of small negotiations.

On August 4, 1944, the arrest came without warning. German officers, acting on a tip, entered the building and ordered everyone out. The eight were taken to the Security Headquarters, then to Westerbork transit camp, then put on the last transport west to Auschwitz. Anne, Margot, and Edith were selected for the women's camp. In October 1944 Anne and Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where conditions were catastrophic. Both contracted typhus. Margot died in late February 1945, and Anne died only days later. The camp was liberated by the British in April 1945. Of the eight, only Otto Frank survived.

What Otto cut

Otto returned to Amsterdam and was given the notebooks by Miep Gies, one of the helpers who had risked her life daily. He read them, then edited them. He cut passages he considered private, unkind, or sexually explicit, particularly Anne's criticisms of her mother and her remarks about her own body. He also cut material about the van Daans that reflected badly on them. The first Dutch edition appeared in 1947, and then translated editions spread worldwide.

For decades, almost everyone read the text Otto had shaped. It was only in 1986 that a critical edition restored much of what he removed, presenting Anne's revisions and her harsher judgments. Readers who grew up on the earlier version often meet a different Anne in the fuller text: angrier, more physical, more willing to wound.

Fame and the museum

The diary became one of the most widely read books of the twentieth century, adapted into plays and films, taught in schools, and translated into dozens of languages. The house at Prinsengracht became a museum that draws more than a million visitors a year. Anne became a symbol, printed on posters and stamps, quoted in speeches about tolerance.

There is an awkwardness in this. Anne wanted to be a writer and hoped to be remembered for her work. Instead she is remembered as a victim, her face frozen at thirteen. Some critics argue that the famous version of the diary flatters us: it lets readers feel sympathy without confronting the industrial scale of the killing that took her. Others point out that the book's very intimacy is its resistance, that a girl insisting on her ordinary complaints against an attempt to erase her is itself a form of defiance.

What does not hold

The editing history is the real problem. You are never reading a transparent record. You are reading Anne's own revisions, then Otto's cuts, then translators' choices, then publishers' decisions about what a family memoir should look like. Each layer is defensible, but the sum of them means the diary is a co-authored object. Saying "Anne's unedited diary" is almost always inaccurate.

This leads directly to the question of which text you are actually reading. Most school editions are still based on the earlier, cleaner version. The fuller critical edition restores the passages about menstruation and about Anne's frustration with her mother, and some teachers and parents quietly avoid it. Readers deserve to know which version they hold, because the two Annes are not identical.

The fame problem is the third weakness. The diary has been pressed into service for everything from museum tourism to political argument, and it sometimes functions as a substitute for history rather than a doorway into it. The book is often taught as a gentle story of hope when it is actually a document about confinement, boredom, jealousy, and fear. Its power survives all of this, but the reader has to push past the monument to find the girl who wrote it.