A couple of brown pages glued to Anne Frank’s diary were, actually, an attempt of the young writer to cover a series of passages involving some of her earlier explorations on the topic of sexuality and ‘dirty’ jokes, researchers have found.
It is well-known that during the two years Frank spent in hiding, she regularly made changes to her diary and, at one point, she glued brown paper over two pages of text. This made their content unreadable until now. With a little help from imaging software, researchers from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam have finally deciphered what the young writer was hiding.
According to the museum, both pages include “five crossed-out phrases, four ‘dirty’ jokes and 33 lines about sex education and prostitution”, all written on September 28, 1942, two months before she and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam.
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One of her “dirty” jokes made a clear reference to the German occupation that was taking place, according to the Associated Press, which had access to the content of the pages.
“Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in Holland? As mattresses for the soldiers.” (“Wehrmacht” was the name for the German military forces.)
Anne Frank also discussed menstrual cycles and how the starting of it means a woman is “ripe to have relations with a man”, but added “one doesn’t do that of course before one is married,” the AP reports.
She also went on to discuss prostitution and brothels of which Frank thought that it was normal for men to visit such places or pay women on the street for their services. She even went on to mention that “In Paris, they have big houses for that” and added that “Papa has been there”.
How researchers deciphered the pages
To finally know the content of both glued pages, researchers used image-processing software that helped them reveal the words written on the paper.
It is unclear why Anne Frank decided to cover such pages, but historians believe it was a form of self-editing or maybe a way to hide its content from her parents or any other inhabitant of the annex.
“Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile,” Frank van Vree, director of the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said in a statement. “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.”