If Anne Frank was alive today, she would have turned 90. However, Anne Frank has forever been immortalised as the 15-year-old girl who had deep conversations written in her diary while she lived hidden behind the filing cabinet of her father’s office in Amsterdam, along with the rest of her family, away from the Nazis before being deported along with seven other hidden persons.
She died in February 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp of typhus, exhaustion and malnutrition.
Now, 75 years after her death, a new version of her famed diary is being published, for now, only in German, titled Liebe Kitty (Dear Kitty). It is being touted to be “an incomplete manuscript of a girl who wanted to become an author,” according to the Anne Frank House.
Liebe Kitty once again highlights Anne Frank’s notes on her life while living hidden from the Nazis. Twenty years ago, the last five pages of her diary were discovered and added to the book The Diary of Anne Frank.
In March 1944, Dutch education minister Gerrit Bolkestein had asked for people to give up their letters and diaries to document the Nazi occupation. Anne on her part, by the time she was discovered by the Nazi police on August 4, 1944, had fervently written a 215 pages rigorous and self-critical revision of her earlier observations and thoughts.
This manuscript, together with the other original documents, the diary and a loose-leaf collection of writings, has formed the basis for all later editions, including Dear Kitty.