Is there any truth to the rumor that Anne Frank’s father was the person who finished writing his daughter’s famous diary? I recall being told that the original is kept in a Swiss bank vault and when examined it was discovered that the last chapters were written in ballpoint pen, a writing instrument not invented until after Miss Frank’s death. –Stavok, via the Internet
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Anne Frank, a precocious Jewish girl whose family emigrated in 1933 from the German city of Frankfurt am Main to Amsterdam, began keeping a diary on her 13th birthday, June 12, 1942. On July 6, the day after her older sister, Margot, received a deportation order to a labor camp, her family went into hiding in a “secret annex” above her father’s place of business, where they were joined by four other refugees. On August 4, 1944, three days after the diary’s last entry, police raided the annex and arrested the eight occupants. Anne and Margot died of typhus within days of each other in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just weeks before the liberation. Their father, Otto, the family’s sole surviving member, returned to Amsterdam after the war and retrieved the diary from two of his former secretaries, who’d scooped up the scattered pages after the arrest. In 1947 he succeeded in getting an edition of 1,500 copies printed. The diary went on to become an extraordinary success: First published in English in 1952, at last count it had sold more than 31 million copies in 67 languages. A Pulitzer Prize-winning stage adaptation opened on Broadway in 1955, followed by an Oscar-winning film version in 1959. The diary–with its haunting words “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart”–remains the best-known literary work to emerge from the Holocaust and World War II.
In 1980 the German criminal investigation bureau fanned the embers of the controversy by issuing a report that made an eyebrow-raising claim: While the paper used in the diary appeared authentic, some corrections to Anne’s rewritten version had been made using a ballpoint pen supposedly not available till 1951. (For the record, ballpoint pens were popular in Britain as early as the late 30s.) The German magazine Der Spiegel published a sensational account of this report alleging that (a) some editing postdated 1951, (b) an earlier expert had held that all the writing in the journal was by the same hand, and thus (c) the entire diary was possibly fake. This logic is faulty, in no small part because premise (b) is wrong–it’s now known that some page numbering and other minor edits were done after the war, probably by Otto or his assistants. But at the time the article caused quite a stir–it’s the likely source of the story you heard.
