By: Myles Burke / BBC
Translation: Telegrafi.com
At first, Otto Frank couldn't bear to read, let alone publish, his daughter's diary which was published 77 years ago this week. In 1976, he went on the BBC programme, Blue Peter, to explain why he did this. "I only got to know her properly through her diary," Otto Frank confessed to journalist Lesley Judd, as he showed her the personal writings of his late and beloved daughter Anne.
On June 12, 1942, Otto had given his bright daughter an autograph book - as a gift for her thirteenth birthday. But Anne almost immediately decided to use it as a diary and began to record her deepest thoughts, writing almost as if she were confiding in a close friend. "I hope that I will be able to trust you, completely, as I have never been able to trust anyone else before," Otto read from Anne's first diary on the children's television program. "And I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me."
After the Nazis' success in the German federal elections and when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich, Otto and his family left Frankfurt - where Anne was born - for Amsterdam in 1933. But the security that the Dutch capital offered, against the threat of the Nazis, would only be a temporary respite for the family. In 1940, after taking power and declaring himself Führer, Hitler invaded the Netherlands. With the German occupation came a wave of anti-Semitic measures. Jews were banned from owning businesses, forced to wear yellow identifying stars, and faced a curfew.
Otto, like many other Jews, had been trying - since 1938 - to emigrate to the United States, but the lack of an asylum policy and the long process of obtaining a visa meant that the documents were not completed before the Nazis closed US consular offices in July 1941 in all German-occupied territories.
A month after Anne's birthday in 1942, Otto's eldest daughter, Margot, received a notice to report to a labor camp in Germany. To avoid the authorities, the entire family moved to a secret annex that Otto had discovered above his business premises in Amsterdam. For the next two years, the Frank family hid in that space, along with another family and a family friend. Confined to the annex, everyone living there was forced to remain silent during the day and could not use the toilet until nightfall when the office was cleaned - for fear of being overheard. Food and supplies were smuggled in by a small group of trusted aides.
All this time, Anne continued to secretly write her thoughts in her diary. Because of her desire for age friends, she invented fictional characters, such as Kitty, to whom she wrote. Her anxiety, aspirations, and boredom, along with the daily frustrations of living in close quarters with other people, all played out in the pages of her diary.
The last part is on August 1, 1944. On the morning of August 4, the Gestapo entered the shelter and all the residents were arrested. The reason for their discovery is still a controversial topic.
The Frank family was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where Otto was separated from his wife Edith and his daughters Margot and Anne. He would never see them again. All three died in the camp. Anne, who was eventually transferred with her sister to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, died of typhus in March 1945 - just weeks before the camp was liberated.
Otto was the only member of the annex who survived. After the war, he returned to Amsterdam to look for his family, but was devastated when he learned of their fate. Anne's diary and letters were saved from the ransacked shelter by her friends Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, who gave them to her upon her return. But in her grief, she could not look at them. "I have no strength to read them," she wrote to her mother in Switzerland on August 22, 1945.
When Otto was finally able to open the diaries, the writings were a new discovery for him. They offered him a window into the mind of a bright, vulnerable, and expressive teenage girl as she navigated the complexities of adolescence in the most terrifying of circumstances. In raw tones, she details clashes with her mother and resentments toward her sister, worries about her reputation and her changing body. She also describes how oppressive the enclosure and silence of the annex were, and how she became irritated with the people she lived with. She wrote of her isolation and the constant, terrifying threat of discovery. She felt like “a songbird whose wings have been clipped and who in total darkness beats against the bars of her cage.”
But Otto also learns about her happy little moments: the nature she watched from the window and her romance with Peter van Daan, the boy who also lived in the annex.
Wrote about her dreams of skating in Switzerland and publishing ambitions; her thoughts on identity and relationships with friends are real and imagined.
She began to understand Anne's complex and imaginative mind as she changed and matured. "I could never write such a thing again," she wrote of one of her earlier diary entries. "Now that I reread my diary, a year and a half later, I am surprised by my childish innocence. Deep down I know that I can never be that innocent again, no matter how much I wish I could be."
Above all, Otto admired Anne's gift as a writer and her extraordinary courage and humanity in the face of the relentless terror of her circumstances. "After I read the diary, I copied it and gave a copy to our friends who knew us all," he told the BBC's Judd in 1976. "One of them was employed by a publishing company and he said, 'You have no right to keep the diary as private property; it is a human document and you must publish it.'"
On June 25, 1947, it was published Secret annex, a book compiled from Anne's journal entries and writings. In addition to correcting some linguistic errors, Otto cleaned it up somewhat by editing out some of Anne's critical impressions of his marriage, passages about her sexuality, and sometimes wild portrayals of people she knew.
The book turned out to be an instant success: a single girl showed the face of horror and the almost incomprehensible magnitude of the Nazi genocide. In 1952 it was published in English under the title Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl. It was staged in the play that won the award Pulitzer in 1956 and on film three years later. Anne's words have outlived her short life; they have been translated into more than 70 languages and continue to resonate with readers around the world.
Asked by Judd, in Blue Peter, If he had reservations when he agreed to publish and reveal the girl's most private thoughts, Otto Frank said: "I did not regret it, because Anna wrote in one of her diaries, 'I want to continue living after death,' and through her diary she is in a way living in many hearts." /Telegraph/
