What Did Anne Frank's Father Remove from Her Diary Before Publishing It?

Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March 1945. She was 15.

Before her arrest, she had been working on a revised version of her diary — she'd heard a radio broadcast encouraging people to save their diaries for publication after the war, and she believed her diary was worth saving. She'd been editing it herself.

Otto Frank, her father, the only member of the family to survive, published the diary in 1947. He made choices about what to include.

He removed the passages where Anne explored her own body with curiosity. He softened the entries where she wrote with fury about her mother. He cut the sections about her romantic feelings, her confusion about sexuality, her anger at the cramped and impossible situation they were all living in.

He was a grieving father doing his best to share his daughter's spirit with a world that had killed her. He was also protecting her privacy the way a father does — from the world, even after death.

The full diary wasn't published until 1995. It includes a girl who was angrier, more curious, more searching than the one most people met. A girl who wrote on April 4, 1944: "I want to go on living even after my death."

She did. In both versions. But the fuller one is closer to who she actually was — which is what she wanted all along.