The Diary of a Young Girl

A diary begun on her thirteenth birthday, weeks before her family went into hiding, and continued until three days before the annexe was discovered.

It was recovered by Miep Gies after the arrest and given to Otto Frank, the only one of the eight to survive, who published it. The physical survival of the manuscript through the arrest is itself close to accidental.

The manuscript survived the arrest by chance, kept by a woman who did not read it before returning it.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Anne rewrote substantial portions herself after hearing a radio broadcast asking Dutch citizens to preserve wartime documents, intending publication.

There are therefore her original entries, her own revised version, and her father's edited selection. The Definitive Edition restores material Otto Frank had removed, including passages about her body and about her relationship with her mother. A reader should know which edition they are reading.

The physical conditions: eight people in concealed rooms above a business, absolute silence required during working hours, no possibility of going outside, dependence on a small number of helpers risking their own lives.

Her observation of the other seven — the tensions, the pettiness, the rationing arguments, the way confinement magnifies small differences — is the diary's most immediately gripping material.

She is a genuinely skilled writer and improves visibly across the two years. She revises, she is self-critical, she experiments with form, and she is explicit about wanting to be a journalist and a writer.

This is worth stating because the diary is frequently treated as artless testimony. It is testimony and it is also deliberate work by someone practising a craft.

Much of the diary is an ordinary adolescence conducted in extraordinary conditions: conflict with her mother, idealisation of her father, frustration at being treated as a child, and the relationship with Peter van Pels.

The restored passages about her body and her sexuality are part of this and were removed from the first editions. Their restoration makes her more fully a person and less a symbol.

Her later entries turn increasingly reflective: on who she is when alone versus in company, on whether she is the person the others see, on what she wants to become.

Her distinction between the lighthearted self she presents and the deeper self she does not show anyone is the most sophisticated writing in the diary and comes from a fifteen-year-old.

Her statement that she still believes people are truly good at heart is almost always cited alone.

In the entry it appears in, it is surrounded by her recognition of approaching devastation and by the acknowledgement that her ideals seem absurd and impractical. It is an act of will against what she can see, not a report of an untroubled belief, and the usual quotation reverses its meaning.

The famous line is an act of will against what she could see, and quoting it alone reverses its meaning.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

It stops. There is no closing entry, no resolution, and the final paragraphs are about ordinary things.

What happened afterward — the arrest, Westerbork, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, her death and her sister's from typhus weeks before liberation — is supplied by the afterword. The diary's silence at the end is part of what it communicates.

Its enormous readership has also produced sentimental adaptations that emphasise hope and elide the ending, which critics including Cynthia Ozick have argued amounts to a distortion.

The corrective is simply to read the whole book including the afterword, and to remember that the reason the diary stops is the subject it is testimony about.

Because a statistic does not communicate and a person does. One articulate adolescent's daily life makes comprehensible what six million cannot.

It is also, independent of its historical weight, a good book — observant, funny in places, psychologically acute, and written by someone who was becoming very good at it.