London enters the history of Anne Frank’s diary through a broadcast that changed what the diary might become: a private record could also be prepared as a book and preserved as public testimony. The city is named not as a place Anne visits, but as the source of a message that crosses into the hidden rooms where she writes and, later, into her hopes for a life beyond hiding.

A broadcast and a change of purpose

In 1944, Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile, spoke on a radio broadcast from London about collecting eyewitness accounts of suffering under the German occupation after the war. He specifically mentioned letters and diaries. Anne was impressed by the appeal and decided she would publish a book based on her diary when the war ended.

The diary’s account of the broadcast makes this a turning point in the record’s intended audience. Anne had initially written strictly for herself; now she began revising the material for future readers while continuing her original diary. The change did not replace the private record with a single finished text: it produced a second, edited version alongside the first.

London in Anne’s imagined future

On March 29, 1944, Anne returned to Bolkestein’s announcement in a diary entry. She imagined publishing a novel about the Secret Annex, whose title might lead readers to expect a detective story, and reflected that people a decade after the war might find it interesting to learn how Jews in hiding lived, ate, and talked. Her remarks connect the broadcast’s public purpose with her own distinct ambition to shape the account and make the hidden community legible to people outside it.

London also appears in a more personal image of the future. Anne hoped to spend a year in Paris and London learning languages and studying art history. This wish belongs to her broader vision of travel, study, and a world of possibilities after the war; it stands in sharp contrast to the confinement that made such plans uncertain.

From manuscript to public record

The appeal from London initiated a sequence of textual changes. Anne’s revised version, known as version b, omitted passages she judged uninteresting and added material from memory, while version a remained her unedited diary. After the war, Otto Frank combined selections from both into a shorter version, version c, which became the familiar published diary. His choices reflected the limits and conventions of the 1947 publication, including a required short length and the omission of passages about sexuality and unflattering descriptions of people in the Secret Annex.

The diary’s publication history continued beyond that first selection. After Otto Frank’s manuscripts were entrusted to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, an exhaustive investigation established the diary’s authenticity, and the complete versions were published with scholarly material on the family, the arrest and deportation, and the handwriting and documents. The Anne Frank-Fonds later commissioned Mirjam Pressler to prepare an expanded edition, supplementing Otto Frank’s selection with passages from versions a and b and adding approximately 30 percent more material. London’s broadcast thus marks the beginning of a chain connecting a hidden writer’s response to a public appeal with the later preservation, verification, and expanded circulation of her work.