VIDEO: Anne Frank Though German Jewish teenager Anne Frank did not survive the Holocaust, the memoirs from her two years in hiding live on forever.
Frank’s candid words on sex didn’t make it into the first published diary, which appeared in English in 1952. Though Anne herself edited her diary with an eye to publication, the book—released eight years after her death from typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15—contained additional cuts. These were only partially restored in 1986, when a critical edition of her diary was published. Then, in 1995, an even less censored version, including a passage on Frank’s own body previously withheld by her father, was published.
It isn’t the first time new material by Frank has been uncovered. In 1998, five additional pages were released—pages that dealt with what Anne saw as the strained and false relationship between her parents. The inclusion of the pages in a biography of Frank sparked a copyright furor, and they were only released in a new critical edition of the book in 2001.
Frank’s inclusion of sexual material in her diaries makes sense—during her 25 months of hiding, she matured from a young girl into a young woman and even conducted a brief romantic relationship with Peter van Pels, a boy who hid with the Frank family. But to those who have read Frank’s diary, the real surprise is not that she addressed sexual topics—it’s that there’s more to discover about a 15-year-old murdered in 1945.