Anne Frank’s period in hiding

Anne Frank’s period in hiding turned the abstract force of Nazi persecution into a closely observed record of restricted movement, crowded routines, insecurity, and endurance. In the Secret Annex, the pressure of concealment entered ordinary acts: where people could go, when they could make noise, how they secured the building, and what could be written down. The diary also had a life beyond the hiding period: Anne revised it with publication in mind, and later editors shaped distinct versions for readers.

From Restriction to Hiding

The restrictions imposed on Jews in the Netherlands narrowed daily life well before the family went into hiding. They were required to wear a yellow star and surrender their bicycles; forbidden to use streetcars, cars, public entertainment, swimming pools, and many sports facilities; and limited in when and where they could shop or be outdoors. They were also required to attend Jewish schools and were forbidden to visit Christians in their homes. Anne’s account presents the cumulative effect as a succession of prohibited ordinary activities, while life nevertheless continued under the rules.

The Frank family had planned to enter hiding on July 16, after moving furniture and clothing out of their apartment over a period of months. Margot’s call-up notice brought the plan forward by ten days, leaving the family with less time to prepare. Anne, her parents, and the others set out on foot in rain, carrying schoolbags and shopping bags. The yellow star made their situation legible to passersby, while the family’s destination and purpose were disclosed to Anne gradually as they walked.

Their refuge was in Otto Frank’s office building. Several office workers knew the family was coming, but the warehouse workers, including Bep Voskuijl’s father and two assistants, were not told. The building’s ordinary commercial functions—its warehouse and workrooms, where spices were stored and ground—stood alongside the concealed domestic life above them. A public description of the refuge later turned its lack of nearby private residences and its access on foot into selling points, while noting that transport forbidden by German authorities could not be assumed.

Daily Life and the Threat of Discovery

The hiding place imposed its own rhythms. In an account of an ordinary evening, Anne describes how bedtime required the Annex to be rearranged: chairs shifted, beds unfolded, and daytime storage converted into sleeping arrangements. Her small divan was only five feet long, so chairs had to be added; bedding for Fritz Pfeffer’s bed was kept elsewhere during the day and brought back at night. Margot’s folding bed, blankets, and pillows added another nightly rearrangement. The routine gives physical form to a life in which shared rooms had to serve several purposes.

The household’s safety depended on vigilance and on limiting ordinary sounds and movements. During one burglary, Peter went down to the warehouse at seven in the morning and found the warehouse door and street door open. He alerted Otto Frank, who went to the private office, tuned the radio to a German station, and locked the door. The residents followed their security rules: they did not wash or run water, stayed quiet, dressed by eight, and avoided using the bathroom. They learned later that burglars had forced the outside and warehouse doors with a crowbar, then entered the next floor when the warehouse offered nothing worth taking. Two cashboxes, blank checkbooks, and sugar coupons for 330 pounds were stolen. The loss threatened the group’s entire sugar allotment, while the break-in made the danger of intrusion immediate rather than hypothetical.

A later security scare led to tighter procedures and fresh debate. Mr. Sleegers was hired as a night watchman, and a carpenter from the underground was expected to build a barricade from the residents’ white Frankfurt bedsteads. Peter was assigned to patrol the house between eight-thirty and nine-thirty, and could no longer open his window after someone connected with the Keg company noticed it. The residents could not flush the toilet after nine-thirty at night, and questions arose about the watchman’s reliability, whether dogs would bark at a sound behind the door, and how the barricade should be made. These adjustments show how the threat of discovery reorganized both the use of domestic objects and the residents’ evening behavior.

Confinement, Mood, and Perspective

Anne presents the emotional cost of hiding through sharp contrasts rather than a single settled mood. She could feel fortunate when comparing her circumstances with those of other Jewish children, yet be plunged into despair when Mrs. Kleiman spoke of Jopie’s hockey club, canoe trips, school plays, and afternoons with friends. Anne says she longed for the unremarkable pleasure of laughing freely. The contrast makes clear that gratitude for survival did not erase grief for the ordinary life that had been taken away.

Winter and the Christmas and New Year holidays intensified the sense of enclosure. Anne worried that writing about her unhappiness might seem ungrateful, but returned to the diary as a place where she could express what she could not keep inside. When someone came in from outdoors, she felt the pull of the fresh air and the life beyond the building; she also described the effort of holding her head up and putting on a bold face while the same thoughts returned repeatedly. The diary preserves both the practiced appearance of courage and the recurrence of longing beneath it.

The Annex’s conditions were not simply a backdrop to Anne’s observations: they defined what could be done, what had to be concealed, and how far the residents’ attention was drawn toward small changes in risk. In one reflection, Anne describes the residents as Jews deprived of rights yet burdened with obligations, and insists that they must endure discomfort, remain brave, and trust that the war would end. Her hope that Jews would again be regarded as people, rather than only as Jews, links the immediate struggle of confinement to a larger claim about identity and survival.

The Diary’s Revisions and Afterlife

Anne first kept the diary for herself. After hearing Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile, call in a London radio broadcast for postwar letters and diaries documenting the Dutch people’s suffering under German occupation, she decided to make a book from her writing. She began revising the diary, improving passages, omitting material she considered uninteresting, and adding recollections, while continuing to keep her original diary. The first, unedited diary is known as version a; her edited rewrite is version b.

After Anne’s final diary entry, dated August 1, 1944, the eight people in hiding were arrested on August 4. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl found the diaries scattered on the floor and Miep put them in a desk drawer for safekeeping. After the war, once Anne’s death was known, she gave them unread to Otto Frank. He chose material from versions a and b to create a shorter version, version c, published as The Diary of a Young Girl. Its length was shaped partly by the requirements of a Dutch publisher’s series. Otto also omitted passages about Anne’s sexuality, which were considered unsuitable for the book’s 1947 young-adult readership, and unflattering passages about his wife and the other Annex residents, out of respect for the dead.

The text’s later publication history made its successive layers visible. After Otto Frank 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 investigation; after the diary was established as genuine, it published the complete versions together with the findings and studies of the Frank family’s background, the arrest and deportation, Anne’s handwriting, and the document materials. The Anne Frank-Fonds, which inherited the copyrights as Otto’s sole heir, then commissioned Mirjam Pressler to prepare an expanded edition for general readers. Approved by the foundation, it restored passages from versions a and b and included approximately 30 percent more material than Otto Frank’s selection, without displacing the earlier edition.

The changing names in the manuscripts also record the movement from private writing toward public presentation. In version b Anne devised pseudonyms for people who would appear in her intended book, and initially considered names for herself before Otto chose to publish under the Frank family’s real name. He followed Anne’s wishes for the other people, while this edition uses the helpers’ real names and retains the pseudonyms used for other individuals in the critical edition. The hiding period is therefore preserved not as one untouched text, but through Anne’s own revisions and the later editorial decisions that determine how readers encounter her testimony.