On 3 April 1946, the Dutch newspaper Het Parool, in its article “A Child`s Voice” first published excerpts from the “Diary of a Young Girl”, written by a teenage girl who died in the Nazi concentration camp Belsen. The diary became world-famous very soon under the unofficial title “The Diary of Anne Frank”.
The publication was prepared by the Dutch historian Jan Romein. The records came to Romein's wife from Anne's father, Otto Frank, a former prisoner of Auschwitz and the only surviving member of the family.
Anne Frank was born on 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt am Main. Since 1934 she had lived in Amsterdam, where her Jewish family tried to escape from Nazi persecution. In 1942 for her 13th birthday, Anne was given a small autograph album in a cloth cover, which became her diary.
The family had been hiding in a shelter from July 1943. In November, Anne wrote: “[Germans] knock on every door, asking whether any Jews live there… In the evenings when it’s dark, I often see long lines of good, innocent people, accompanied by crying children, walking on and on, ordered about by a handful of men who bully and beat them until they nearly drop. No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children, babies and pregnant women — all are marched to their death”.
In 1944, the shelter was revealed by a snitch and all present were sent to the Westerbrock transit camp. Anne’s parents were sent to Auschwitz, where her mother Edith Frank died of starvation; her daughters - Margot and Anne herself - died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in February 1945.
Some documents, including Anne's diary, remained in the shelter after the Gestapo raid. A local resident kept them to hand over to the Frank family should they have survived. This is how Anne’s diary ended up with her father after the war. The name of the informer has never been known, but whoever it was received seven-and-a-half guilders for each Jew who was caught.
Jan Romein wrote in his article that the diary “stammered out in a child's voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence at Nuremberg put together”.
On 25 June 1947, the initial 3,000 copies of Anne’s diary entitled “The Shelter” were published. Subsequently, the book was translated into 70 languages; it became the basis for films and performances. In Amsterdam, the shelter where the Frank family had hidden was restored to how it was when the Frank and the Van Pels families were concealed there. The building became the Anne Frank Museum.
Until the end of his death, Otto Frank opposed the publication of the full text of the manuscript. He kept the original in a safe in a Swiss bank and officially bequeathed the text to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, where the manuscript was transferred in 1980 after Otto's death.
