Exactly what writings by Anne Frank have been preserved?

12 June 1942 was Anne Frank’s thirteenth birthday. Among the presents she received was a notebook: an almost square book with a red-white-gray checkered cover and a clasp. In this she was going to keep her diary. Her first diary ends on 5 December 1942. Her second surviving diary book, a school exercise book, begins on 22 December 1943 and continues up to 17 April 1944. It is highly improbable that Anne Frank did not keep a diary between December 1942 and December 1943, so we must assume that this section has been lost. Her third and last diary volume, also a school exercise book, begins on 17 April 1944 and ends on 1 August 1944.

Other texts

Besides her diary, Anne also wrote Verhaaltjes, en gebeurtenissen uit het Achterhuis (Tales from the Secret Annex) in a large accounts book, and she filled a small, narrow cash book with quotations: her Mooie-Zinnenboek (Favourite Quotes Notebook). This Verhaaltjesboek and Mooie-Zinnenboek have both been preserved.

Two versions

From June 1942 onwards, the diaries of Anne Frank describe in a penetrating way the daily life of the eight Jewish people in hiding in the annex on the Prinsengracht canal in Amsterdam. Anne Frank rewrote her diary entries herself in the annex, with a view to them possibly being published after the war.

She did this on sheets of carbon copy paper: the so-called “loose sheets.” On these loose sheets of paper she reorganised and rewrote her earlier diary entries: she reordered texts, sometimes combining entries from various dates under one date, and considerably shortening some sections. In this way she created a second version, in which the events of December 1942 to December 1943 are described. The loose sheets have been preserved: their last entries date from 29 March 1944. So the first version of the diary was not fully preserved, while the second version was unfinished.

Preparing for publication

To help in the search for a publisher for Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex, as Anne had named her second version) Otto Frank had parts of the diary entries typed out in late 1945.
In doing so he left out some sections, moved others and made some corrections. This created a typescript, but it was not yet a book. At Otto Frank’s request, his friend Albert Cauvern then made a second typescript. With Otto Frank’s permission, Cauvern changed nine of the thirteen names that Anne herself – with a view to possible publication – had invented for the people in hiding in the secret annexe and their helpers.

Both typescripts have been preserved. Finally, an editor from Contact Publishers became the third person to work on the texts, correcting typing errors and bringing the manuscript into line with the publisher’s style guide. All of this resulted in the first Dutch publication of Het Achterhuis in June 1947.^[1]

Three versions under one cover

Otto Frank, who died 19  August 1980, stated in his will that all of his daughter’s manuscripts should be left to the Dutch nation. The Dutch government transferred the stewardship of the manuscripts to the National Institute for War Documentation (Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, RIOD), which later became the Dutch Institute for War Documentation (Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, NIOD).

In 1986, RIOD published the three versions of the diary described above – the preserved original diary entries, the version rewritten by Anne Frank herself, and the edition compiled by Otto Frank and published by Contact Publishers in 1947 – together under one cover: De Dagboeken van Anne Frank.^[2]

Five pages surface in 1998

In 1998, five previously unknown pages from the diary of Anne Frank turned up. They were five loose sheets that Otto Frank had already set apart before the publication of the diary in 1947. In all probability, Otto Frank did not want to make these diary fragments public because of Anne’s rather hurtful observations about his first wife, who died in Auschwitz, and their marriage.

They were made public by Cor Suyk, a former employee of the Anne Frank House. Suyk’s explanation was that Otto Frank had given him the five sheets for safe keeping. The loose sheets were sold by Suyk to the Dutch nation, and subsequently added to the rest of the diary, which was held by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD). The five pages were first included in the fifth, revised edition of De Dagboeken van Anne Frank (2001).^[3]

The NIOD asked the Forensic Institute – which had already carried out extensive research into the authenticity of the diary in the first half of the 1980’s – to also investigate these five loose sheets. The Forensic Institute concluded after forensic document and handwriting analysis that ‘the handwriting in the questioned documents and the handwriting in the reference material, consisting of loose sheets in the diary of Anne Frank, were produced – with a probability bordering on certainty – by the same hand.’^[4] That is the most certain degree of identification that the Netherlands Forensic Institute can give. In other words: there is no reason whatsoever to presume that the five returned loose sheets were not written by Anne Frank.