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The Diary of a Young Girl, Page 31

Anne Frank


  As I’ve told you, what I say is not what I feel, which is why I have a reputation for being boy-crazy as well as a flirt, a smart aleck and a reader of romances. The happy-go-lucky Anne laughs, gives a flippant reply, shrugs her shoulders and pretends she doesn’t give a darn. The quiet Anne reacts in just the opposite way. If I’m being completely honest, I’ll have to admit that it does matter to me, that I’m trying very hard to change myself, but that I’m always up against a more powerful enemy.

  A voice within me is sobbing, “You see, that’s what’s become of you. You’re surrounded by negative opinions, dismayed looks and mocking faces, people who dislike you, and all because you don’t listen to the advice of your own better half.” Believe me, I’d like to listen, but it doesn’t work, because if I’m quiet and serious, everyone thinks I’m putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke, and then I’m not even talking about my own family, who assume I must be sick, stuff me with aspirins and sedatives, feel my neck and forehead to see if I have a temperature, ask about my bowel movements and berate me for being in a bad mood, until I just can’t keep it up anymore, because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if … if only there were no other people in the world.

  Yours, Anne M. Frank

  ANNE’S DIARY ENDS HERE.

  1 Initials have been assigned at random to those persons who prefer to remain anonymous.

  2 Anne’s cousins Bernhard (Bernd) and Stephan Elias.

  3 Nervous.

  4 After Dussel arrived, Margot slept in her parents’ bedroom.

  5 Now you’re splashing!

  6 Mommy.

  7 For crying out loud!

  8 When the clock strikes half past eight.

  9 A well-known expression: “The spirit of the man is great, / How puny are his deeds.”

  10 By way of exception.

  11 A famous line from Goethe: “On top of the world, or in the depths of despair.”

  12 Anne’s grandmother was terminally ill.

  13 Grammy is Anne’s grandmother on her father’s side, and Grandma her grandmother on her mother’s side.

  14 The last four paragraphs of this entry have never been published before. For a further explanation, see page vii of the Foreword.

  15 Oh, you are cruel.

  16 I’ll decide that.

  17 Thank you, God, for all that is good and dear and beautiful.

  18 Should be Präservativmitteln: prophylactics.

  19 Anne’s second home.

  20 Cervix.

  21 Oh, for heaven’s sake.

  22 Gerrit Bolkestein was the Minister of Education and Pieter Gerbrandy was the Prime Minister of the Dutch government in exile in London. See Anne’s letter of March 29, 1944.

  23 Disappeared.

  24 Necking.

  25 Until we speak again.

  26 The Abduction of Mother, a possible reference to Mozart’s opera The Abduction from the Seraglio.

  27 Incalculable loss, terrible, awful, irreplaceable.

  28 An affront to racial purity.

  29 Acts like a schoolgirl, looks like a frump.

  30 The leader of the Dutch National Socialist (Nazi) Party.

  31 Anne’s English.

  32 Cousin Bernhard (Buddy) Elias.

  AFTERWORD

  On the morning of August 4, 1944, sometime between ten and ten-thirty, a car pulled up at 263 Prinsengracht. Several figures emerged: an SS sergeant, Karl Josef Silberbauer, in full uniform, and at least three Dutch members of the Security Police, armed but in civilian clothes. Someone must have tipped them off.

  They arrested the eight people hiding in the Annex, as well as two of their helpers, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman—though not Miep Gies and Elisabeth (Bep) Voskuijl—and took all the valuables and cash they could find in the Annex.

  After the arrest, Kugler and Kleiman were taken to a prison in Amsterdam. On September 11, 1944, they were transferred, without benefit of a trial, to a camp in Amersfoort (Holland). Kleiman, because of his poor health, was released on September 18, 1944. He remained in Amsterdam until his death in 1959.

  Kugler managed to escape his imprisonment on March 28, 1945, when he and his fellow prisoners were being sent to Germany as forced laborers. He immigrated to Canada in 1955 and died in Toronto in 1989.

  Elisabeth (Bep) Voskuijl Wijk died in Amsterdam in 1983.

  Miep Santrouschitz Gies is still living in Amsterdam; her husband Jan died in 1993.

  Upon their arrest, the eight residents of the Annex were first brought to a prison in Amsterdam and then transferred to Westerbork, the transit camp for Jews in the north of Holland. They were deported on September 3, 1944, in the last transport to leave Westerbork, and arrived three days later in Auschwitz (Poland).

  Hermann van Pels (van Daan) was, according to the testimony of Otto Frank, gassed to death in Auschwitz in October or November 1944, shortly before the gas chambers were dismantled.

  Auguste van Pels (Petronella van Daan) was transported from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, from there to Buchenwald, then to Theresienstadt on April 9, 1945, and apparently to another concentration camp after that. It is certain that she did not survive, though the date of her death is unknown.

  Peter van Pels (van Daan) was forced to take part in the January 16, 1945 “death march” from Auschwitz to Mauthausen (Austria), where he died on May 5, 1945, three days before the camp was liberated.

  Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel) died on December 20, 1944, in the Neuengamme concentration camp, where he had been transferred from either Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen.

  Edith Frank died in Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 6, 1945, from hunger and exhaustion.

  Margot and Anne Frank were transported from Auschwitz at the end of October and brought to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp near Hannover (Germany). The typhus epidemic that broke out in the winter of 1944–1945, as a result of the horrendous hygienic conditions, killed thousands of prisoners, including Margot and, a few days later, Anne. She must have died in late February or early March. The bodies of both girls were probably dumped in Bergen-Belsen’s mass graves. 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. After Auschwitz was liberated by Russian troops, he was repatriated to Amsterdam by way of Odessa and Marseille. He arrived in Amsterdam on June 3, 1945, and stayed there until 1953, when he moved to Basel (Switzerland), where his sister and her family, and later his brother, lived. He married Elfriede Markovits Geiringer, originally from Vienna, who had survived Auschwitz and lost a husband and son in Mauthausen. Until his death on August 19, 1980, Otto Frank continued to live in Birsfelden, outside Basel, where he devoted himself to sharing the message of his daughter’s diary with people all over the world.

  Brothers Robert and Otto Frank in the German Army, 1916.

  Wedding of Edith and Otto Frank, Aachen, Germany, 1925.

  Margot and Anne with their father, Frankfurt, Germany, 1930.

  Anne (right) and her friend Sanne Ledermann, Amsterdam, 1935.

  Anne, Aachen, Germany, 1934.

  Edith Frank, May 1935.

  Otto Frank May 1936.

  Anne’s tenth birthday, Amsterdam, June 12, 1939 (left to right: Lucie van Dijk, Anne, Sanne Ledermann, Hanneli Goslar, Juultje Ketellapper, Käthe Egyedie, Mary Bos, Ietje Swillens, Martha van den Berg).

  Margot, Anne and Grandma Holländer, Zandvoort, Holland, 1939.

  Anne, Amsterdam, 1941.

  Mrs. van Daan, Mr. van Daan and Victor Kugler, Amsterdam, 1941.

  Otto, Anne and Margot Frank walking along with other guests to the wedding of Jan and Miep Gies, Amsterdam, June 1941.

  The Frank family, Amsterdam, 1941.

  Anne, Amsterdam, 1935-42 (left to right: May 193
5, December 1935, May 1936, May 1937, May 1938, May 1939, May 1940, May 1941, May 1942).

  263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam, front view.

  263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam, rear view. The Secret Annex (top two floors and attic) as seen from the courtyard garden.

  Johannes Kleiman next to the bookcase, after the war.

  Peter van Daan (date and place unknown).

  Albert Dussel (date and place unknown).

  Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, Amsterdam, 1945.

  Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler, Amsterdam, 1945.

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 1996

  Copyright © 1991, 2001 by The Anne Frank-Fonds, Basel, Switzerland

  English translation copyright © 1995, 2001 by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Photographs copyright © The Anne Frank–Fonds, Basel, Switzerland Anne Frank Stichting

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition was originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday in 1995. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The translator is grateful to Stacy Knecht for her editorial assistance and to Nancy Forest-Flier for her translation of the following poems: 1 - 2 - 3

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77620-4