How Anne Frank's diary became letters to an imaginary friend named Kitty
Anne Frank picked out a red checked autograph book the day before her 13th birthday in June 1942. Weeks later her family vanished into a hidden annex in Amsterdam. By the time she was arrested in August 1944, the diary had grown into a carefully revised manuscript she hoped to publish.
The book was a present on 12 June 1942, though she had chosen it herself in a shop near home. On 5 July her 16-year-old sister Margot was summoned to a Nazi labour camp, and the next day the family went into hiding in sealed upper rooms behind the Amsterdam premises of Otto Frank's pectin company, Opekta. Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their son Peter soon joined them. Eight people in all lived there until 4 August 1944, when the group was discovered, possibly by accident during a police raid on ration fraud rather than through betrayal. Only Otto survived; Anne died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen aged 15.
Her writing changed shape as she went. After two months of ordinary entries she began addressing letters to imaginary friends named after characters in Cissy van Marxveldt's novels, and by 13 November 1942 she was writing to just one, Kitty. Speculation that Kitty was a real schoolmate began in the 1970s, but the unabridged edition showed she was one of eight invented correspondents.
A radio broadcast from London on 29 March 1944 turned a private habit into a project. The exiled Dutch education minister Gerrit Bolkestein urged citizens to keep everyday papers such as diaries as evidence of life under occupation. Anne began rewriting her entries for future readers, producing what scholars now call Version B alongside her original Version A. Some notebooks were lost when the annex was cleared; what remains is three hardcover volumes and up to 300 loose pages in fountain pen.
Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl rescued the papers and Gies handed them to Otto after the war. He published a discreet selection as Het Achterhuis in Amsterdam in 1947, and the 1952 English translation made it famous, inspiring a 1955 stage play. It has appeared in more than 70 languages, and the Dutch text entered the public domain in the European Union on 1 January 2016.
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl
