Dutch researchers have unveiled hidden pages from Anne Frank’s diary, on which are written risque jokes and candid musings on sex, contraception and prostitution.
The Anne Frank House Museum said the Jewish teenager had pasted brown masking paper over the pages to conceal their content from others. Researchers used digital technology to decipher the writing on the pages beneath.
“Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile,” said Frank van Vree, director of the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. “The ‘dirty’ jokes are classics among growing children. They make it clear that Anne, with all her gifts, was above all also an ordinary girl.”
Anne, age 13 at the time, wrote the two pages on September 28, 1942, less than three months after she, her family and another Jewish family went into hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex behind a canal-side house in Amsterdam.
Later on, possibly fearing prying eyes or no longer liking what she had written, she covered them over with brown paper with an adhesive backing like a postage stamp, and their content remained a tantalising mystery for decades.
Read the article in The Australian (AP).