Things Your History Class Didn't Teach You About Anne Frank

The "diary" part of The Diary of Anne Frank is a misnomer. The work as we know it was actually a series of notebooks repurposed for her personal writing, including an autograph album and two school exercise books. The famous red-and-white-checkered book we know as the iconic "diary" was started on June 12, 1942, and

The "diary" part of The Diary of Anne Frank is a misnomer. The work as we know it was actually a series of notebooks repurposed for her personal writing, including an autograph album and two school exercise books. The famous red-and-white-checkered book we know as the iconic "diary" was started on June 12, 1942, and its last entry was made on December 5, 1942. This was the diary Anne Frank received for her 13th birthday, which she herself had chosen at a shop before knowing she would go into hiding.

The next school exercise book covered December 22, 1943, to April 17, 1944, and the third covered April 17, 1944, until a few days before her arrest on August 4, 1944. Do you see anything missing? Historians believe that a missing notebook covering the majority of 1943 was never uncovered. Nobody knows how this second notebook was lost, but fortunately, much of the content was likely reproduced in Anne Frank's preparation of The Secret Annex. 

As ThoughtCo points out, Anne Frank would have needed that missing notebook to make her rewrites in 1944, but there is no definitive way of knowing when the notebook went adrift. As Anne Frank liberally reworked her entries, like removing her love for Peter in her later draft, there's no way of knowing what details never made it out of that notebook.

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