Dutch Government Retrieves Five Omitted Pages of Anne Frank's Diary
Cornelis Suijk—a former director of the Anne Frank Foundation and president of the U.S. Center for Holocaust Education Foundation—announced in 1999 that he was in the possession of five pages that had been removed by Otto Frank from the diary prior to publication; Suijk claimed that Otto Frank gave these pages to him shortly before his death in 1980. The missing diary entries contain critical remarks by Anne Frank about her parents' strained marriage, and discusses Anne's lack of affection for her mother. Some controversy ensued when Suijk claimed publishing rights over the five pages and intended to sell them to raise money for his U.S. Foundation. The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, the formal owner of the manuscript, demanded the pages to be handed over. In 2000, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science agreed to donate US$300,000 to Suijk's Foundation, and the pages were returned in 2001. Since then, they have been included in new editions of the diary.
In the new-found entries -- actually five pages of diary revisions censored by Anne's father, Otto -- Anne picks apart her parents' strained marriage, analyzes her own difficult relations with her mother, Edith, and vows to keep the diary out of her family's hands as ''none of their business.''
More information
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Anne Frank at the Holocaust Encyclopedia
www.ushmm.org