Yesterday at 17:17
A new translation and stand-alone edition of the diaries of Jewish teenager Anne Frank is being published today in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
That’s 75 years after the Holocaust diarist wrote the work that’s been translated into at least 60 languages. At a presentation in Berlin, Holocaust survivor Laureen Nussbaum, who also knew Frank, said the book is what the young girl wanted to publish.
“This is the book that Anne wanted to write and to publish. The diary that we have read all the time (for so long) was Mr. Frank’s (Anne’s dad) amalgam of the original diary entries with the new version and it’s kind of a mixture,” she said.
Nussbaum knew Frank and her family when they lived in Amsterdam during World War II. They were not close friends. The book, entitled “Liebe Kitty” is an incomplete manuscript of a girl who wanted to become an author, according to Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House museum.
“For me, the diary as we read it, have read it since 1947, the most relevant part was never what she told because I knew this. I mean for me personally. I knew how it was to be in hiding, I knew how you had to go on tiptoes, I knew how you had to whisper. For me, it was always important that a young person took the pen and wrote. And it’s important that we listen to young people. It was then and it is now again very important,” Nussbaum said
The museum calls the work “the creative and literary choices Anne has made” and “brings the reader closer to the writer Anne Frank.” Frank and her family hid from the Nazis in a secret annex in a house in Amsterdam during World War II but were discovered in 1944. She died at the age of 15 at th Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
