Otto Frank, the father of famed diary writer and Holocaust victim Anne Frank, visited the BBC in 1976, where he explained his decision to have his daughter’s diary published.
Anne Frank’s diary was written, addressed to the fictional character ‘Kitty’, as the young Jewish child hid in an attic in her father’s factory from the Nazis occupying Amsterdam. She had dreams of being a writer, which were cut short when Nazis found the hiding family and transported them to concentration camps. Otto Frank was the only survivor.
In June of 1947, Otto Frank decided to publish his daughter’s diary – a text that later became a bestseller and is still used in Holocaust education in numerous countries today.
The diary, originally intended as an autograph book, had been a 13th birthday gift to Anne Frank. However, Anne Frank almost immediately repurposed it – writing “I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do to anyone before and I hope you will be a great support and comfort to me.”
Otto Frank told the BBC of his struggle to read the diary, let alone publish it. After some time, he explained, “I only learned to know her through her diary.”
The diary was kept by his bedside at night while the family was in hiding, and Otto Frank had promised never to peek at the inner workings of his daughter’s mind. It became a complex issue for him after learning that his family would never return from the camps.
“Anne’s anxiety, aspirations and boredom, along with the routine frustrations of living so tightly cooped up with other people, were all laid out on her diary pages,” Otto Frank explained.
“After I had read the diary, I copied it, and I gave a copy to friends of ours who had known us all,” he told the BBC in 1976. “One of them was employed in a publishing firm and he told me ‘you have not the right to keep the diary as a private property, it’s a human document and you should publish it’. And so I did.”
Asked if he ever regretted publishing his daughter’s private thoughts, Otto Frank answered, “I didn’t regret it because Anna wrote in one of her diaries, ‘I want to go on living after my death’, and in a certain way, through her diary, she is living on in many hearts.”
About the Frank family
The Frank family had been living in Frankfurt but escaped to Amsterdam in 1933 after the Nazi Party took power. Despite attempting to flee to safety, Hitler’s military began occupying the Netherlands.
Otto Frank had attempted to secure passage for his family to enter the United States, but the lengthy process failed to go through before the Nazis shut US consular offices in 1941.
From 1942 until 1944, the Frank family hid in tight quarters alongside another family, hoping to escape Nazi prosecution.
Anne Frank’s final entry came only three days before the Gestapo discovered the Jewish family, arresting them and transporting them to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Anne Frank, along with her sister Margot and her mother Edith, perished in the camps.