Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 2, 1995 TAG: 9506300124
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY MARIE BEAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
She is everyone's cousin. Or daughter. Or little sister. She is Anne Frank, the Dutch teen-ager immortalized in the diary she kept when she and her family were in hiding in Amsterdam to escape the horrors of Nazi occupation.
First published in 1947 in Holland, "The Diary of a Young Girl" has been reissued 50 years after Anne's death.
This new translation adds to a story familiar to two generations of readers. It contains 30 percent more material previously unavailable. The restored entries were omitted from the original publication by Anne's father, Otto Frank, and by the Dutch publisher of the diary. In 1947 it was not customary to write as openly as Anne did about sex in books for young adults. And out of respect for the dead, Otto omitted unflattering passages about his wife and other residents of the "Secret Annex," as their hiding place was called.
Anne was not one to keep opinions to herself.
"The Definitive Edition" includes several black and white photographs of the Frank family taken before they went into hiding; of the building where the Secret Annex was located; and of their helpers, Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kukgler.
An afterword provides details of the arrest of the eight people in hiding and their subsequent deportation to various concentration camps. Anne and sister Margot died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in late February or early March 1945, and were buried in a mass grave. The camp was liberated by British troops on April 12, 1945.
Otto Frank was the only one of the eight to survive the concentration camps. Until his death in August 1980, he lived near Basel, where he devoted himself to sharing the message of his daughter's diary with people all over the world.
Anne began keeping the diary soon after she and her family went into hiding in June 1942. Initially she wrote it strictly for herself. Then one day in 1944, she heard a member of the Dutch government in exile announce in a radio broadcast that after the war he hoped to collect eyewitness accounts of the suffering of the Dutch people at the hands of the Nazis. He specifically mentioned letters and diaries.
Anne's entry for May 11, 1944, (not included in the earlier edition) expresses her great wish to be a journalist, and later on, a famous writer. After the war, she confessed, she hoped to publish a book called "The Secret Annex." "It remains to be seen whether I'll succeed, but my diary can serve as the basis." She began editing her diary entries with a view to publication.
Later she would write, "I want to go on living even after my death." And so she does.
Marie Bean is a retired college chaplain.
by CNB