THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 11, 1995 TAG: 9503110256
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A9 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium: 55 lines
She lives on as the powerful voice of a lost generation.
But like most girls her age, Anne Frank also wallowed in the trivialities of adolescence: boys, gossip, stormy standoffs with Mom.
``They say she can't stand me. But I don't care, since I don't like her much either,'' Anne wrote about a classmate on June 15, 1942, shortly before the Frank family went into hiding from the Nazis.
Anne's sometimes irreverent observations, and references to her budding sexual awareness, are in a newly expanded version of her famous diary.
Schoolchildren and celebrities, including Estelle Parsons, Celeste Holm, Garson Kanin and Michael Moriarty, gathered Thursday for a reading to mark the 50th anniversary of Anne's death in a concentration camp in early March 1945. She was 15.
Read aloud before an audience of 2,000, the words took on an endearing tone, sometimes prompting laughter: ``J. is a detestable, sneaky, stuck-up, two-faced gossip. . . . Herman Koopman also has a filthy mind.''
Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who helped hide the Franks and later saved Anne's diary, said Anne's father omitted passages out of modesty and respect for his dead wife.
``I imagine a mother,'' wrote Anne, ``as a woman who, first and foremost, possesses a great deal of tact, especially toward her adolescent children, and not one who, like Momsy, pokes fun at me when I cry.''
The Frank family moved from Germany to Amsterdam in a futile effort to avoid the Nazi persecution of Jews.
Anne kept her diary from June 1942 to August 1944, when the Gestapo raided the family's hiding place. In one entry, Anne wrote about the 17-year-old boy Peter van Daan who shared the family's hideaway.
``I'd like to ask Peter whether he knows what girls look like down there,'' Anne wrote about the boy who eventually gave her her first kiss. She then wrote a graphic description of female genitalia.
After the Nazis stormed the hideaway, Gies sneaked in and recovered Anne's diary. She hid it in her desk drawer, unread, waiting for Anne to come home.
Gies eventually presented the diary to Otto Frank, the family's sole survivor, on the day he got a letter confirming Anne's death.
``I gave him the diary with the words, `This is the legacy from your daughter, Anne.' '' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Anne Frank
by CNB