INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Anne Frank's diary entries record the 25 months she spent hiding from Nazis from 1942 to 1944
(File)Washignton: Anne Frank's diary entries record the 25 months she spent hiding from Nazis from 1942 to 1944
with her family and others in a secret attic annex in occupied Amsterdam
Frank's father, the only member of the family to survive after they were seized by the Gestapo and removed to a concentration camp,
published the diary after the war, turning the teenager into a universal symbol of hope and resilience.The book, with its red-checked cover,
was not written with an eye toward publication
Her private thoughts and observations were for her eyes only, very much "The Diary of a Young Girl," as its title suggests.Now researchers
in the Netherlands have discovered in the diary a secret hidden for decades, obscured from prying eyes by Anne, who meticulously pasted
brown paper over the pages.On two pages, Anne, who was 13 years old at the time, penned four "dirty" jokes and more than 33 lines explaining
sex, contraception and prostitution, the Anne Frank House announced Tuesday
The entry, dated September 28, 1942, also included five crossed out phrases, the museum said.The recently publicized pages of hidden text
serve to highlight "Anne the girl," and her "inquisitive" and "precocious" personality, the Anne Frank House said."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.The passages were revealed by image-processing
Using photos of the pages taken in 2016 as part of a regular check of the diary, software helped decipher the words, the statement said.In
an effort to save pages of her precious diary that had been "spoiled," Anne decided to use some of the space to jot down risque jokes she
may have heard from her father or on the radio, the Anne Frank House said."A man had a very ugly wife and he didn't want to have relations
with her," she wrote, as translated from Dutch by the Associated Press
"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!!!'"She also
included this suggestive quip: "Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in Holland As mattresses for the soldiers." (The Wehrmacht
was the German term for the country's armed forces.)Following the jokes, Frank delved into sex education, pretending in the entry that she
was teaching someone else, the museum said."I sometimes imagine that someone might come to me and ask me to inform him about sexual
matters," Frank wrote in Dutch, according to the New York Times
"How would I go about it"While attempting to explain these "sexual matters," Frank used highbrow phrases such as "rhythmical movements" to
describe sex, and "internal medicament," to talk about contraception, the New York Times reported.Being a teenage girl, she made sure to
include a section about periods too, saying menstruation is "a sign that she is ripe to have relations with a man but one doesn't do that of
course before one is married," according to the AP.On prostitution, Frank wrote, "All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like
that accost them on the street and then they go together." She added that "In Paris they have big houses for that
Papa has been there."It is unclear why Frank chose to cover her musings with the sticky brown paper, but researchers say she may have been
trying to hide the content from her father or anyone else living in the cramped attic quarters.Despite being shrouded in mystery for more
than 70 years, the uncovered pages "do not alter our image of Anne," the Anne Frank House said
The writings were not unusual for the teen, who had other diary entries about sex and "regularly" recorded dirty jokes, the museum said.The
pages are significant because they show Frank's first attempts to develop her literary voice, the AP reported.Ronald Leopold, executive
director of the Anne Frank House, told the AP the entry is an early example of how Frank "creates a fictional situation that makes it easier
for her to address the sensitive topics that she writes about.""Given the great public and academic interest we have decided
to publish these texts and share them with the world," Leopold said in a statement from the museum
