Anne Frank’s ‘dirty jokes’ found in hidden diary pages.
Researchers have uncovered two hidden new pages from Anne Frank’s diary that include a handful of dirty jokes and her thoughts on sex.
The German-born teenager became a household name worldwide after her diary was published following World War Two, during which she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Frank, then 13, wrote the newly discovered diary pages on 28 September 1942, three months after she, her family and another Jewish family went into hiding from the Nazis in the attic of a house in the Dutch city of Amsterdam, The Guardian reports.
The passages had been covered with “gummed brown paper, apparently to hide her risque writing from her family”, the BBC says, but new imaging techniques have allowed researchers to read them.
“A man had a very ugly wife and he didn’t want to have relations with her,” she wrote, according to an Associated Press translation of the original Dutch text. “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!!!’”
“I sometimes imagine that someone might come to me and ask me to inform him about sexual matters,” Frank also wrote. “How would I go about it?”
The Independent says she “attempts an answer, addressing an imaginary listener with a lofty tone, using phrases such as ‘rhythmical movements’ to describe sex, and ‘internal medicament’, to refer to contraception”.
Frank van Vree, director of the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said in a statement: “Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile. 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.”
Ronald Leopold, executive director of Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House museum, added: “They bring us even closer to the girl and the writer Anne Frank.”
