Image copyright Ann Frank Museum Image caption Anne Frank's diary, written in hiding from the Nazis, is widely read more than 70 years after her death
Two new pages from Anne Frank's diary have been published, containing a handful of dirty jokes and her thoughts on sex.
The young Jewish teen's diary, written in hiding from the Nazis, became world-famous when published after her death and at the end of the war.
The hidden pages had been covered with gummed brown paper - apparently to hide her risqué writing from her family.
New imaging techniques have finally allowed researchers to read them.
The entries were written on 28 September 1942, not long after the 13-year-old Anne went into hiding.
"I'll use this spoiled page to write down 'dirty' jokes", she wrote on a page with a handful of crossed-out phrases - and jotted down four dirty jokes she knew.
She added a few dozen lines about sex education, imagining she has to give "the talk" to someone else, and mentioning prostitutes - who she wrote elsewhere that her father had told her about.
"Anne Frank writes about sexuality in a disarming way," said Ronald Leopold of the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam. "Like every adolescent she is curious about this subject."
The sentiment was echoed by Frank van Vree, director of the Niod institute, which helped decipher the pages from new photographs taken in 2016.
"Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile," he said.
"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."
One of the jokes reads: "Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in the Netherlands? As mattresses for the soldiers."
The Anne Frank Museum said this was not the only time the teenage girl wrote about sex - mentioning other jokes she had heard the people in her hidden home tell, or the passages about her periods and sexuality.
Writing about the decision to publish pages that Anne clearly wanted to keep hidden, the museum said that her diary - a Unesco-registered world heritage document - held significant academic interest.
But it also said that the pages "do not alter our image of Anne".
"Over the decades Anne has grown to become the worldwide symbol of the Holocaust, and Anne the girl has increasingly faded into the background," it said in a statement.
"These - literally - uncovered texts bring the inquisitive and in many respects precocious teenager back into the foreground."
Anne Frank went into hiding in a secret annexe of her father's business on 5 July 1942 - about a month after she received a diary for her 13th birthday.
She lived there with her family and their friends, the Van Pels, until their discovery two years later. How they were found after so long in successful hiding remains a mystery.
Anne Frank died of disease in a Nazi death camp in 1945, the year the war ended. Her father, the only family member to survive, published her diary in 1947.
ricarleite on May 16th, 2018 at 12:15 UTC »
Here's the whole two pages, and a translation of it all.
The most fascinating part is her implication her uncle Walter is a homosexual.
http://www.annefrank.org/ImageVaultFiles/id_19220/cf_21/AfgeplaktePaginas_AFS_TranscriptieBeschrijvingDisc.PDF
PiraatPaul on May 16th, 2018 at 12:08 UTC »
Translation here! The four jokes are:
"Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in the Netherlands? As mattresses for the soldiers."
"A man arrives at home one evening and notices another man had been in bed with his wife. After searching the whole house he finds a completely naked man in the bedroom closet. When he asked what he was doing in there, the man replied: you can believe me or not but I'm waiting for the tram."
"A man had a very ugly wife and he didn't want to have relations with here. One evening he arrived home and saw his friend in bed with his wife, and he said: he does and I must!" (note: this is not a weird translation, I genuinely don't understand the joke)
"A man and a woman had relations together, and after a few months the woman got fat. The man brought in a doctor who said: It's all air madam, all air! The man then said: 'But I don't pump air?"
And the text:
I sometimes imagine that someone would come to me and ask me to teach him about sexual subjects, how would I do that? This is the answer:
A woman gets her period around her 14th year and that's the sign she is ripe to have relations with a man but of course they don't do that before they get married. When they are married they can do it, they can also decide to want children or not if they do the man lies on top of the woman and does the male seed in the female vagina, that happens by rhythmic movements. If they do not want children the woman can take an internal remedy and that will help, of course it can also sometimes fail, but if they do want children it can sometimes fail as well. A man thinks this 'living together' is a pleasure and has a need for it a woman less but also. All men if they are normal go with women, on the street woman will approach them and they will go together. In Paris there are big houses for it. Dad has been there. Uncle Walter isn't normal. Girls sell this"
I tried to keep the spelling and grammar as similar as possible to Anne's writing and apparently she hates commas. Also her dad visited brothels and her uncle was gay. The more you know!
ykickamoocow111 on May 16th, 2018 at 10:26 UTC »
I don't see the problem with publishing it as teenagers tell and like dirty jokes. All this would do is humanise Anne Frank even further and show people that she was like any other teenager in what she liked, her hopes and her dreams.