The Diary of Anne Frank: A Play

On July 14, 1942, Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday. Less than a month later, Anne and her family would go into hiding, along with the Von Pels family and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer, in a Secret Annex in the building that housed her father’s business. The red plaid diary filled quickly, and after five months in hiding, Anne started writing in notebooks and on loose pages. She documented her experiences in epistolary entries addressed to “Kitty,” her name for the diary that became her friend and confidante. She also wrote stories and the start of a novel. In March 1944, after the Dutch Minister of Education announced on the radio that they would be seeking to publish personal documents and accounts of the war, Anne immediately started revising her diary into a book entitled Het Achterhuis, or The Secret Annex. After the families were arrested, Miep Gies, the woman who was helping to hide them, found Anne’s diaries and papers, and she hid them in her desk without reading them, hoping to have the chance to give them back to Anne. The contents of the diary were dangerous, and if Miep had read them, she would have needed to destroy them to protect everyone involved.