Kitty

Kitty is the imagined friend to whom Anne Frank addresses her diary, a literary confidante who gives a private record the shape of an ongoing conversation. Anne chose the name because she wanted to write not as someone merely listing facts but as someone confiding in a friend. Across entries about school, restrictions on Jewish life, fear, longing, and daily routines, the address creates a steady point of contact—even though Kitty is not presented as a person who answers. The diary’s passage from private writing to a book Anne hoped to publish, and then through several editorial versions, makes that intimate address part of the work’s public history.

Creation of a Confidante

Anne explains the need for Kitty by describing the distance she feels even among friends. She has admirers, loving aunts, and a good home, yet finds that time with friends stays at the level of ordinary conversation. She cannot bring herself to speak about what matters most, and doubts that this lack of intimacy will change. The diary begins as a response to that absence: a place where she might confide what she cannot share in ordinary company.

To make the imagined friendship more vivid, Anne decides not simply to record events as most people might, but to treat the diary itself as a friend and call that friend Kitty. She recognizes that a reader entering her stories without context would need a brief account of her life, but the central gesture is not an effort to produce an impersonal chronicle. It is the invention of an addressee who can receive a continuing account of her thoughts and experiences.

This distinction shapes the diary’s voice. Anne opens entries with direct addresses such as “Dearest Kitty,” then moves from the immediate business of the day into reflection. The name provides continuity across changing subjects and circumstances: a conversation that begins in the language of friendship can hold both a report about school and a thought that she has no one with whom she can truly speak.

The Diary as Ongoing Conversation

The early entries show how the address accommodates the textures of an ordinary young life. In June 1942, Anne tells Kitty that the house is quiet while her parents are out and her sister Margot has gone to play Ping-Pong. She describes her own enthusiasm for the game and the club she and four other girls have formed, “The Little Dipper Minus Two.” Its name rests on their mistaken belief that the Little Dipper had five stars; when they discover it has seven, the error becomes the joke that gives the club its title. Their games at the Wagners’ home often end with ice cream at Oasis or Delphi, places that allow Jewish customers.

That casual account sits alongside the restrictions that delimit the girls’ choices. In another June entry, Anne describes walking in sweltering heat after Jews have been prohibited from using streetcars. A long trip from school to a dentist on Jan Luykenstraat leaves her nearly asleep at her desk; she notes the kindness of the dental assistant and that the ferry remains the only mode of transportation available to Jews. Addressing Kitty lets Anne set ordinary discomfort and exclusion in the same register, without turning either into an abstract statement detached from daily life.

The form also allows news from beyond the hiding place to enter as something Anne is telling a trusted listener. When Mr. Dussel arrives, he brings reports of friends and acquaintances taken away and of military vehicles going from door to door in search of Jewish families. Anne writes of the danger conveyed by such accounts and of the distress of knowing that people she cares about are exposed to it while she cannot help them. In a later entry she describes deportations, families separated, Dutch Christian sons sent to Germany, and the war’s reach across countries. Against that scale of suffering, the residents of the Secret Annex appear fortunate, yet their safety prompts Anne to question their attention to future clothes and shoes rather than aid for others after the war. Kitty’s imagined listening presence can hold the tension between the sheltered room and the suffering Anne hears about outside it.

A Witness Across Changing Circumstances

As the diary continues, Kitty remains the addressee while the material Anne brings to her changes. In July 1943, Anne records a break-in at the building. Peter discovers that the warehouse and street doors are open; the residents follow the rules for such a danger, keeping quiet, avoiding water, and dressing by eight. The episode moves from the immediate uncertainty of the morning to the explanation that burglars forced the doors with a crowbar. The familiar address helps frame a security threat as one more experience Anne needs to communicate, rather than as an interruption of the diary’s personal voice.

In November, the tone turns toward absence and apprehension. Anne writes to Kitty that Hanneli Goslar appeared in a dream, dressed in rags and looking thin and worn. The entry makes the friend’s image a point of emotional concern within the diary; Kitty is the person to whom Anne can bring that distress. The imagined confidante does not resolve the separation, but the act of telling gives the fear and longing a place in the record.

Anne’s need for conversation also becomes concrete in her decision to seek out Peter. In January 1944, she explains to Kitty that her longing for someone to talk to has grown difficult to bear, and that she has chosen Peter for that role. A crossword puzzle gives her an excuse to remain in his room; they sit across from each other at a table, Peter on a chair and Anne on a divan. She reads his shyness and uncertainty, wants to invite him to speak about himself, but finds it easier to imagine questions than to ask them. The passage illuminates the contrast between the openness she has built with Kitty and the hesitation she still experiences in face-to-face intimacy.

By February, Anne tells Kitty that thoughts of Peter occupy her from morning until night and that she falls asleep and wakes with his image in mind. She wonders whether they are less different than they appear, relating her sense of maternal distance to her view of Peter’s relationship with his mother. The diary’s private addressee thus accompanies Anne not only through external danger but through her effort to understand attachment, loneliness, and the possibility of closeness.

From Private Address to Published Text

Kitty’s role belongs to the diary’s composition as well as its scenes. Anne began keeping the diary in June 1942 for herself. After hearing Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile, call in a London broadcast for wartime letters and diaries to be collected and made public, she decided to prepare a book based on her writing. She rewrote and edited the diary, removing passages she considered insufficiently interesting and adding material from memory, while continuing the original version. The Critical Edition later distinguished the first, unedited diary as version a and Anne’s revised text as version b.

Anne also devised pseudonyms for people who would appear in her planned book, at first considering Anne Aulis and later Anne Robin as names for herself. Her father, Otto Frank, ultimately chose to publish the family under their own names while following Anne’s wishes for the others. The evidence therefore places Kitty within an authored and revised project: the address was part of a diary Anne shaped with a future readership in mind, not merely a name added by later editors.

After Anne’s arrest and death, Otto selected material from versions a and b to make a shorter version, version c, published in 1947. The choice was shaped by the Dutch publisher’s series format and by conventions of the time: passages about Anne’s sexuality were omitted, as were unflattering passages about her mother and other residents of the Secret Annex. These decisions affected what readers initially encountered in the diary addressed to Kitty, even as the name and conversational form remained part of its appeal.

When Otto died in 1980, he left Anne’s manuscripts to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam. Following an investigation into the diary’s authenticity, the Institute published the versions together with research on the family, the arrest and deportation, Anne’s handwriting, and the documents and materials. The Anne Frank-Fonds later commissioned an expanded edition for general readers, prepared by Mirjam Pressler. It supplemented Otto’s original selection with material from Anne’s versions a and b and contained approximately 30 percent more material, while leaving the earlier edition intact. Through these stages, Kitty’s intimate address remained a recognizable thread in a text whose contents and editorial frame changed.

Significance of the Address

Kitty is not a separate character with an independent biography or a recorded reply. Her significance lies in the communicative role Anne gives the diary: an imagined friend who makes room for confidences that ordinary friendships do not seem to permit. That choice allows everyday observations, private uncertainty, and testimony about persecution to coexist within a single voice. The diary can move from a Ping-Pong club’s playful name to the restrictions on Jewish movement, from fear for people outside to the desire for a closer personal connection, without abandoning its form as a message to someone.

The address also marks the distance between the circumstances of writing and the diary’s afterlife. Anne first writes for herself, then revises with publication in mind; Otto’s edited edition narrows and rearranges the material, and later editions restore passages from her earlier versions. Kitty remains the imagined recipient across that movement from private confidante to public book. The result is not a literal exchange but a durable literary relationship: Anne’s choice of a friend’s name turns the diary into a place where her experiences can be told, preserved, and eventually read by others.