June 12, 1942

June 12, 1942, is the date Anne Frank began her diary, which became both a private confidante and a work she later prepared for publication. The date opens not only a record of her life from thirteen to fifteen, but also the layered textual history of Anne’s original entries, her own revisions, and the editions assembled after her death.

The Birthday and the First Entry

The diary began on Anne’s thirteenth birthday. She recalled waking at six in the morning, having to restrain her curiosity until she was allowed to get up, and then going to the dining room, where Moortje greeted her. Among the birthday presents on the table was the diary, which she described as one of the nicest gifts she had received. The occasion gives the date its intimate scale: the beginning of a major written record is first presented as one object among flowers, books, sweets, and other family gifts.

Anne initially wrote for herself. In her opening address, she hoped that the diary would become a source of comfort and support, expressing a need to confide that she had not been able to satisfy with another person. By September 1942, she had begun writing regularly to Kitty and reflected that keeping a diary in this form had become a pleasure she looked forward to. The date therefore marks the start of a relationship between writer and page that developed beyond the birthday present itself.

From Private Journal to Planned Book

The diary’s purpose changed in 1944, when Gerrit Bolkestein of the Dutch government in exile spoke on the radio from London about collecting eyewitness accounts of suffering under German occupation, including letters and diaries. Impressed by the broadcast, Anne decided that after the war she would publish a book based on her diary. She began revising her earlier entries, improving the text, removing material she considered insufficiently interesting, and adding passages from memory, while continuing to keep her original diary.

This work produced two versions by Anne: the first, unedited diary, later designated version a, and the revised text, version b. The shift matters to the significance of June 12: what began as a personal record acquired an intended public life while Anne was still writing. Her diary was not simply preserved unchanged; she actively reconsidered how her experience might be shaped for readers.

Publication, Selection, and Authentication

After the last diary entry, dated August 1, 1944, Anne and the other residents of the Secret Annex were arrested on August 4. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl found the diaries scattered on the floor and put them away in a desk drawer. After the war, when it became clear that Anne was dead, Miep gave the papers, unread, to Otto Frank. He eventually chose material from Anne’s versions a and b and edited it into a shorter version c, published in 1947 as the book known around the world as The Diary of a Young Girl.

Otto’s selection was shaped by the planned length of the book and the conventions of its time. He omitted passages about Anne’s sexuality, which were considered unsuitable for a young-adult book in 1947, as well as unflattering passages about his wife and the other residents of the Secret Annex, out of respect for the dead. Anne, by contrast, had written frankly about her likes and dislikes. Her own revisions and her father’s later editing therefore represent different stages of selection, each affecting what readers could see of the writer and her relationships.

When Otto died in 1980, he left Anne’s manuscripts to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam. Because the diary’s authenticity had been challenged, the Institute commissioned an extensive investigation. After the diary was established as genuine, the complete texts and the results of the study appeared in The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, which includes versions a, b, and c, alongside research on the Frank family, the arrest and deportation, Anne’s handwriting, and the document’s materials.

The Expanded Edition and the Meaning of the Date

The Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel, Otto’s sole heir and holder of Anne’s copyrights, later commissioned an expanded edition for general readers. Mirjam Pressler compiled it, supplementing Otto’s selection with passages from Anne’s versions a and b. The edition contains approximately 30 percent more material than the earlier one; its publication did not invalidate Otto’s original selection, which had brought the diary and its message to millions of readers.

Anne’s own retrospective comments also show how much could change between the beginning and later stages of the diary. In a January 1944 comment on an earlier passage, she observed that she could no longer write in the same way and described her former self as innocently open. Elsewhere, she records the bodily changes of adolescence as a private, meaningful experience and, at fourteen, insists on her growing independence and own principles. On her fifteenth birthday, June 13, 1944, she lists gifts from family members, the other residents, and helpers, placing a bouquet of peonies from Peter among the day’s presents. These later birthday and self-reflective entries make June 12, 1942, a point of comparison: the diary opens with a thirteen-year-old receiving a book, and continues into an increasingly self-conscious account of growth.

The date’s importance is thus both personal and textual. It marks the start of Anne’s diary, but the surviving work is also the product of her planned rewriting, Otto Frank’s postwar editing, subsequent authentication, and the expanded edition’s restoration of additional material. Each stage preserves the significance of the original act of writing while presenting it to readers through a different editorial frame.