Today in History—June 14: The Day Anne Frank Started Her Diary
Two days after turning 13, Anne Frank wrote her first full entry in “Kitty,” the name she called the diary she received on her birthday.
The entry is unremarkable—about 200 words on the excitement she felt on her birthday, the gifts she opened, and the treats she shared with classmates. But the circumstances were anything but ordinary.
By the time Anne put pen (and pencil) to paper, the Dutch had surrendered to German invaders, the Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, was in exile in London, exhorting her people through radio broadcasts to maintain their spirit in the face of German occupation, and Nazi measures had forced Anne to transfer from her public school to a Jewish one.
What the Frank family had tried to escape some eight years earlier—moving from Germany to the Netherlands following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power—was now at their doorstep.
Less than a month after her June 14 entry, Anne and her family would go into hiding in the “secret annex” of her father’s business.
Over the next two years Anne filled Kitty, other notebooks, and loose sheets with what her father, Otto—the annex’s sole survivor of the Holocaust—would publish in 1947 as Het Achterhuis (“The Secret Annex”). Overflowing with insight, humor, and emotion, the book became a classic of war literature, appearing in more than 65 languages, including English as The Diary of a Young Girl.
And yet…
Four risqué jokes that Anne had hidden by covering them with brown paper were deciphered by researchers in 2018.
Since the book first appeared, small but persistent groups have claimed that Anne Frank was fictional and that her father falsified her writings for profit. Not surprisingly, the claims have often been associated with Holocaust denial.
Those accusations have long been discredited. Anne’s life is documented through photographs, school and civil records, eyewitness testimony, and the preserved annex in Amsterdam; the diary manuscripts themselves have been examined and authenticated by historians and forensic experts.
Anne could not have known, as she wrote in her diary that day in 1942, that her words would outlive the regime that sought to erase her. But her diary stands today as one of the most widely read and extensively documented personal accounts of World War II.
- 761: Days the Frank family spent in hiding
- ~50,000: Words Anne wrote between May and August 1944
- 3,036: First edition copies of Het Achterhuis published in 1947
- 1777: The Continental Congress adopts the Stars and Stripes as the U.S. national flag
- 1911: The Olympic, sister ship of the Titanic, embarks on her maiden voyage
- 1993: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court
