Hidden Pages In Anne Frank’s Diary Revealed — And They’re Filled With Sex Talk And Dirty Jokes
Wikimedia CommonsAnne Frank in Amsterdam, 1940.
The Diary of a Young Girl remains one of the most powerful and poignant firsthand accounts of the Holocaust ever written. But these newly-revealed pages are not at all what you’d expect.
More than 70 years after Anne Frank wrote in her diary for the last time while hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, the Anne Frank House has announced that they’ve finally been able to decipher two hidden pages.
For decades following her 1944 capture and death at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp the year after, researchers had been aware of these pages. But Frank had covered them up with brown adhesive paper — and now we have a pretty good idea of why she did so.
Using state-of-the-art imaging software to analyze photographs of the pages, researchers at the Anne Frank Museum, the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands discovered that the hidden text was full of Frank’s thoughts on issues like sex, prostitution, and contraception, including some dirty jokes to boot.
Anne Frank House/TwitterThe taped-over pages of the diary, concealed by brown adhesive paper.
“I’ll use this spoiled page to write down ‘dirty’ jokes,” she wrote, according to the BBC, before proceeding to jot down four such jokes. As reported by the Associated Press, one joke reads: “Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in Holland? As mattresses for the soldiers.”
Another joke reads: “A man had a very ugly wife and he didn’t want to have relations with her. One evening he came home and then he saw his friend in bed with his wife, then the man said: ‘He gets to and I have to!!!’”
“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.”
This funny news certainly brought some light to an otherwise dark history.
