Anne Frank’s Diary Is Published in Amsterdam

On 25 June 1947, Contact Publishing in Amsterdam issued a modest first print run of 3,036 copies of a Dutch book titled Het Achterhuis. The title, which Anne had chosen herself, means The Annex, and the volume compiled personal writings that Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish teenager, had kept while concealing herself from Nazi persecution for over two years. Frank had perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945 at the age of fifteen, leaving behind her red-checkered diary, two later notebooks and more than 215 loose sheets of rewritten text. The surviving papers had been retrieved from the hiding place by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl before occupying forces emptied the building, then handed to Otto Frank, Anne's father and the annex's sole survivor, upon confirmation of his daughters' deaths.

Frank began keeping her journal shortly after receiving a red-and-white checkered autograph book for her thirteenth birthday in June 1942. When the family went into hiding behind a movable bookcase in Otto Frank's Amsterdam pectin firm weeks later, writing became her primary refuge. Over time, her entries transformed from conventional journal notes into letters addressed to an imaginary confidante named Kitty, inspired by characters in novels by Cissy van Marxveldt. In March 1944, Frank heard a London radio address by exiled Dutch education minister Gerrit Bolkestein, who appealed to citizens to safeguard everyday diaries and letters as historical records of wartime hardship. Galvanized by this call, she began rewriting and expanding her entries on loose sheets of paper with the clear ambition of publishing a book after the war.