Did Anne Frank Rewrite Her Diary? The Two Versions

2026-09-14 · Yesterself

Yes. She did. In the last months in the annex, not yet fifteen, Anne Frank sat down and began rewriting her diary from the beginning — on loose sheets of thin paper, with a title chosen and pseudonyms assigned, aiming at a book she hoped to publish after the war.

People find this unsettling when they first hear it, because the diary is usually described as the most unguarded document ever printed. The two facts sit together fine. She wrote it once for herself and started writing it again for a reader. What survives is both attempts, plus a third version assembled by her father. Knowing which is which changes how you read the book, and it raises a question anyone who keeps a journal eventually faces: what do you owe your own earlier pages?

Version A: the diary as she kept it

Anne received a checked cloth-covered album for her thirteenth birthday on June 12, 1942, and started writing in it almost immediately. When it filled she carried on in school exercise books and notebooks. The last dated entry is August 1, 1944. The police came on August 4.

Version A is not complete. The original pages covering a long stretch of 1943 have never been found. For that period the only text we have is Anne's own later rewrite — which is a strange thing to sit with, since it means part of the most famous diary in the world reaches us only through its author's revision.

She also edited version A while she was still living it. In 2018, researchers at the Anne Frank House, working with the Huygens Institute and the Dutch war documentation institute, photographed two pages she had pasted over with brown paper and read what was underneath: some off-color jokes and her notes on sex and contraception. A thirteen-year-old covering her own page is already the whole story in miniature: a diarist deciding what the record should say.

One more detail from the original. She did not begin by writing to Kitty. Early on she addressed entries to several invented girls borrowed from a Dutch novel series she loved. Kitty was one name among them.

The broadcast that changed the project

On March 28, 1944, Gerrit Bolkestein, the education minister in the Dutch government-in-exile, spoke on Radio Oranje from London. After liberation, he said, the country should collect ordinary people's diaries and letters so the occupation could be documented from the inside. The people in the annex were listening. Anne wrote about the broadcast the next day.

Within weeks the diary had a second purpose. It was no longer only a place to put the day. It was material.

Version B: Anne's own rewrite

From late May 1944 she worked through her old notebooks and produced a new manuscript on loose sheets. This was not a fair copy. It was editing, and the moves are the ones any writer makes:

• Pseudonyms. The van Pels family became the van Daans. Fritz Pfeffer became Dussel. She made a list, including a name for herself.
• One addressee. She standardized on Kitty and rebuilt the whole thing as a correspondence, which gave the book a form it did not originally have.
• Cuts and compressions. Dull days went. Entries were merged. Repetition was thinned.
• Additions. She wrote scenes she had never recorded at the time, and an introduction supplying background a stranger would need.
• A title. Het Achterhuis — the house behind, the annex.

She had worked her way forward as far as the end of March 1944 when the arrest stopped her. So for the first two years there are two Annes on the page: the girl who lived it and the young writer revising her. For the final months, there is only the first one.

Version C: her father's edition

Otto Frank was the only one of the eight to survive. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl had gathered the scattered papers after the arrest, and Miep kept them without reading them until it was confirmed Anne had died. The book appeared in Amsterdam in 1947.

Otto worked from both manuscripts and made a third text. He cut sharp passages about his wife, Edith. He cut material about Anne's body and her sexuality. He cut for length, and for what a publisher in 1947 was willing to print. He kept his daughter's pseudonyms for everyone else.

The record has been reopened several times since. In 1986 the Netherlands state institute for war documentation published a critical edition printing A, B and C in parallel — partly a response to people claiming the diary was a forgery; the handwriting, ink and paper were examined and the papers confirmed as hers. In 1991 a new edition restored much of what Otto had left out. In 1998 five pages he had held back, containing Anne's blunt assessment of her parents' marriage, came to light.

What editing does to a private record

The two Annes sometimes disagree, and that is not a scandal. It is what revision is.

Revision gives you shape, a reader, an explanation for things you never had to explain to yourself. It also costs you something specific: the unguarded sentence, the judgment written on a bad day for a bad reason, the boredom that was itself evidence of what the days were like. Version A is not more honest than version B. It is honest about a different thing. One tells you what happened to her. The other tells you what she decided it meant.

There is a moment in the diary that shows her working out the same problem. Rereading her own earlier pages about her mother, she was startled by how much anger was in them — she wondered how she could have written that way. She did not tear the page out. She left it standing and wrote about it instead.

That is a third option most people never consider. Not keep, not delete. Answer.

If you are thinking of editing your own journal

1. Copy before you cut. Whatever you do next, the original should still exist somewhere unedited. Anne's rewrite is precious partly because we still have most of what it came from.
2. Date the edit. An undated revision quietly becomes the original. Mark the layer and mark the day.
3. Decide who it is for. Anne's rewrite got better the moment she knew a stranger would read it — and lost things at the same moment. A private page and a page for readers are different jobs.
4. Don't mistake tidying for lying, or rawness for truth. Both versions are made things.
5. Prefer replying to revising. A dated response under an old entry keeps the disagreement visible. Overwriting hides it.

That last one is worth practicing deliberately; there is more on the ethics and mechanics of it in editing old journal entries.

It is also the idea underneath Yesterself, a journaling app built around correspondence with your own archive: each morning it brings back one thing you wrote, and your evening reply becomes tomorrow's mail. The old entry arrives as a letter, and the thing to do with a letter is answer it. It is not out yet, and the waiting list on the site is the only door so far.

When people ask whether Anne Frank rewrote her diary, the worry behind the question is usually whether the book is real. It is. She wrote it twice because she wanted it read — and then someone else finished the editing she did not live to do.

Common questions

Did Anne Frank rewrite her diary?

Yes. In the spring of 1944 she began rewriting her diary on loose sheets of paper for a book she hoped to publish after the war. She had reached roughly the spring of 1944 in the rewrite when the arrest stopped her.

What is the difference between version A and version B?

Version A is the diary as she kept it day to day in albums and notebooks. Version B is her own revision, with pseudonyms, Kitty as the single addressee, cuts and merged entries, added scenes and an introduction written for a stranger.

Which version am I reading in a bookshop?

Most editions descend from the text Otto Frank assembled in 1947 from both manuscripts. A 1991 edition restored much of what he had left out, and the 1986 critical edition prints all three versions side by side.

Does the rewrite mean the diary is not authentic?

No. Revising a manuscript for publication is ordinary authorship, not fabrication. The 1986 critical edition examined the handwriting, ink and paper and confirmed the documents are hers.

Should I edit my own old journal entries?

You can, but keep the original text and date any revision so you do not quietly lose the record of who you were. In many cases writing a dated reply under the old entry is more useful than rewriting it.