The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
A girl without a nationality
“My first wish after the war is that I may become Dutch! I love the Dutch, I love our country, I love the language, and I want to work here. And if I have to write to the queen myself, I will not give up until I have reached my goal.”
In 1933, Anne Frank fled to the Netherlands with her family, as antisemitism in Germany intensified. There, they lived as German citizens until the Nazi regime stripped them of their nationality in 1941. They were not granted another nationality in return and became stateless.
In March 1944, the Dutch Minister of Education, Gerrit Bolkestein, called on Radio Oranje for people to preserve wartime diaries and correspondence. Anne decided to rewrite her diary as a novel titled Het Achterhuis.
During this period, Anne wrote in her diary that she wanted to become Dutch. This wish was never fulfilled. In August, after working on her novel for just three months, she was discovered and arrested. She died without a nationality in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Her diary was published two years later with the help of her father, Otto Frank, the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust.
Het Achterhuis has since been published in more than seventy languages and is among the most widely read books in the world.
Fenix presents a rare first edition of Het Achterhuis in its collection exhibition All Directions. Only 3.036 copies were printed in the first edition in 1947. The diary on display at Fenix has a bookseller’s label from the Rotterdam bookshop H. Swarte on Zwart Janstraat, a business that no longer exists.
“Although Anne Frank felt Dutch, she was not formally a Dutch citizen. Only after her death did she become a world-renowned Dutch icon. Precisely for that reason, it feels fitting and meaningful to share her story in this place.”
