Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Announce on Tuesday, Anne Frank’s diary, recovered two pages of sexual related content concealed by blank brown paper pasted over the text during a routine preservation. Using modern technology, the text included four mildly sexual jokes, thoughts on teaching sex including contraceptives, and talked about her first mensural cycles.

The Diary of Anne Frank, was published by Frank’s father Otto Frank after World War II ended for the first time in 1947. His daughter’s diary describes the life of a 13-14-year-old Jewish girl hiding in Nazi occupied Amsterdam. As a literary success, the diary has become one of the most significant artifacts of the Holocaust and World War II. The diary survived the August 4, 1944 Gestapo raid on the Frank’s hiding spot because her father’s secretary Miep Gies discovered the red patterned journal in the annex returning it to Otto Frank after his concentration camp release. Otto Frank was the only survivor of the Frank family and the others hiding above the annex which is now a museum. After the Gestapo raid, the Franks’ were moved to the Auschwitz Concentration Camps. Documentation is sparse, but Frank (15) would later be moved and ultimately die at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, sometime during 1945.

The Anne Frank House is the responsible party preserving the artifact using minimally invasive modern techniques. Employing a high resolution camera with an intense light shining through the page researchers and preservationists captured the concealed pages with enough detail for further analysis. Using advanced computer programs compensating the diary’s physical property, composition, age, deterioration, and other text, the team was able to determine the content of the concealed pages without removing the pasted paper damaging the valued artifact.

Dated September 28, 1942, Frank would state her purpose for the two pages, “I’ll use this spoiled page to write down ‘dirty’ jokes.” It is unknown exactly who pasted the brown pages, but Frank may have done it since her writing suggested her father was reading the diary. Otto Frank, may have wanted to redact those pages preserving the innocence of his daughter prior to publication. The origins of the jokes is also unknown, Frank may have overheard adults, interpreted radio broadcasts, or developed them.

Frank’s ‘dirty’ humor included wartime commentary with the promiscuous joke, “Do you know why the German girls of the armed forces are in the Netherlands? As a mattress for the soldiers.”

Infidelity was addressed with, “A man comes home at night and notices that another man shared the bed with his wife that evening. He searches the whole house, and finally also looks in the bedroom closet. There is a totally naked man, and when that one man asked what the other was doing there, the man in the closet answered: ‘You can believe it or not but I am waiting for the tram.’ ” She also added, “A man had a very ugly wife and he did not want a relationship with her. One evening, he came home and he saw his friend lying in bed with his wife and the man said: ‘He does and I have to!!!!’ ”

One statement offered new candor on Otto Frank’s history and prostitution with, “All men, when they are normal, go with women, on the street such women talk to them and then they go together. In Paris, there are big houses for that. Dad has been there.” Her final joke about sexual relationships was, “A man and a woman had a relationship, and after a few months the woman’s belly was getting disturbingly big. Then, the man called a doctor who said: ‘It’s just air, Mrs., just air!!!” The man replied: ‘I am not pumping air, am I?’ ”

On sex, Frank wrote, “I sometimes imagine that someone might come to me and ask me to inform him about sexual matters … How would I go about it?” She would describe it as, “rhythmic movements”. Her thoughts about sex coincided with an entry about her first menstrual cycles, describing it as, “a sign that she is ripe to have relations with a man but one doesn’t do that of course before one is married.”

In all, researchers and preservationists recovered 5 crossed out phrases, 4 jokes, and 33 lines of text. The recovery of this information adds a new aspect to Frank’s thoughts, history, and personality. The executive director of the Anne Frank House, Ronald Leopold, describes the historical and literary significance stating, “Anne Frank writes about sexuality in a disarming way. Like every adolescent she is curious about this subject. She also writes about it on other, uncovered pages. They bring us even closer to the girl and the writer Anne Frank.”

[edit]