The Diary of a Young Girl

Can a thirteen-year-old girl turn her worst nightmare into the most powerful voice against oblivion? Anne Frank didn’t just survive in the pages of her diary: she conquered eternity by writing letters to an imaginary friend while the world burned around her.

On June 12, 1942, Anne receives the gift that would transform horror into literature. An autograph book becomes confessional, emotional trench, testament of a generation. From that moment, Kitty—fictional character inspired by a Dutch youth series—will be the recipient of her secrets, her fears, her adolescent rebellious outbursts and her devastatingly mature intuitions. Anne writes in Dutch, sprinkles words in German and English, and builds a parallel universe where she can breathe while outside the Gestapo patrols Amsterdam’s streets. What Otto Frank discovers after the war when he finally opens those notebooks is not just the testimony of a victim: it’s the complex mind of a born writer who transformed confinement into narrative laboratory.

For 761 days, eight people breathe in silence in the annex above Otto Frank’s office. Anne can’t use the bathroom until night. She can’t scream, laugh, run. But she can write. And she writes. More than 50,000 words distributed among her original diary, short stories, a book of beautiful phrases copied from other authors, the beginning of a novel and the rewritten version of her own testimony when she hears on Radio Oranje Minister Bolkestein’s call to preserve documents of the occupation. At barely fifteen, Anne already edits her own story: eliminates the crudest passages about her mother, details of her sexual awakening, softens her criticisms. The Anne of 1944 implacably analyzes the Anne of 1942. We don’t know what she wrote in 1943: those notebooks never appeared. What we do know is that on August 1, 1944 she writes her last line. Three days later, the Gestapo bursts into the annex.

Otto Frank is the only survivor of the eight hidden. Edith dies of hunger in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Margot and Anne perish from typhus in Bergen-Belsen weeks before the camp’s liberation. When Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl hand him the papers rescued from the ransacked annex, Otto has no strength to read them. It takes months. When he finally does, he discovers a daughter he never fully knew: brilliant, critical, sensual, ambitious, terrified, hopeful. “I only really got to know her through her diary,” he would confess in 1976 to BBC cameras. On June 25, 1947, “The Secret Annex” is published. Anne had written: “I want to go on living even after my death.” Seventy-seven years later, translated into more than 70 languages, Anne Frank continues conversing with Kitty in millions of hearts that will never forget her.