By Stephanie Watson

Anne Frank’s diary, published after its author died in a German concentration camp at age 15, is for many people the defining document of the Holocaust. The diary, originally titled Het Achterhuis, is a national treasure to Jewish women and girls throughout the world, and many Holocaust survivors and historians, such as Primo Levi, have said that it serves as a solid representation of the millions of Jews and other oppressed people who suffered at the hands of the Nazi party. But not everyone realizes that the book published under the title The Diary Of A Young Girl is an abridged, reworked, and redacted version of the diary Anne actually wrote. For me, that knowledge was almost enough to make me boycott the book.

I had managed to avoid reading Anne’s diary for most of my life, but not too long ago I decided to give it a go in audiobook form. The narrator, Helena Bonham Carter, started with the forward of the Penguin edition. She set the scene, described the book’s importance, discussed the war — and then explained that the book had been heavily edited:

“To begin with, the book had to be kept short so that it would fit in with a series put out by the Dutch publisher. In addition, several passages dealing with Anne’s sexuality were omitted; at the time of the diary’s initial publication, in 1947, it was not customary to write openly about sex, and certainly not in books for young adults. Out of respect for the dead, Otto Frank also omitted a number of unflattering passages about his wife and the other residents of the Secret Annex.”

That’s when I turned it off.

There’s something very unsettling about the idea of editing someone’s personal and autobiographical journal. After all, it’s supposed to be a portal into the past: Anne’s experience in the annex, exactly what happened exactly as it happened. To omit important facts and attitudes from its pages just seemed wrong. So I couldn’t continue listening to it, particularly after learning that many omitted sections were on gender-specific topics like sexuality and a young woman’s relationship to her mother.

As it turns out, there are actually three versions of Anne’s diary. Version A is the original journal, the actual words she wrote while in hiding. Version B is Anne’s rewrite in novel form, after she heard on the radio that Minister Bolkestein — the minister for Education, Art and Science during World War II — had requested that all diaries during the German occupation were to be kept and studied for years to come. But version C is the one that most schools handed out in English class, and Anne had no control over that version at all.

‘The Diary Of A Young Girl’ is an abridged, reworked, and redacted version of the diary Anne actually wrote.
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After her father was given the remains of both versions by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, who hid the Franks, he and the publishing house edited them into a version that combined the original diary and the rewritten version, with some additional redactions. I considered this blend offensive to Anne’s privacy — since in the diary itself she stated that she didn’t want anyone to read her unfiltered thoughts. Moreover, it omits things that she surely would have wanted kept in version B, since she put them there in the first place.

According to the forward of Penguin’s Definitive Edition (the audiobook I began listening to), several paragraphs on Anne’s personal attitudes and experiences were edited or completely removed from version C. Anne’s opinions on her parents were edited to seem less harsh — for instance, this version removes the line “Father’s fondness for talking about farting and going to the lavatory is disgusting.”

Anne’s thoughts and observations about her body were also cut in version C. Take a look at this section in which she talks about her vagina: “Until I was 11 or 12, I didn’t realize there was a second set of labia on the inside [of the vagina], though you couldn’t see them. What’s even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris.”

The edited version is scoured of references to Anne’s adolescent sexuality. “I told him [Peter] all about girls, without hesitating to discuss the most intimate matters,” Anne wrote in the diary, about her potential boyfriend in the annex. “I found it rather amusing that he thought the opening in a woman’s body was simply left out of illustrations. He couldn’t imagine it was actually located between a woman’s legs. The evening ended with a mutual kiss, near the mouth . . . “ The edited version also removes Anne’s references to her period: “PS. I forgot to mention the important news that I’m probably going to get my period soon. I can tell because I keep finding a whitish smear in my panties.”

I already worried that heavy editing of Anne’s diary was disrespectful to her memory. But seeing the content of the changes, it seemed that the edits were also an act of misogyny. The redacted sections dealt with love, sex, and body changes, all topics that women were discouraged from talking about in the 1940s and are still discouraged from talking about today. If Anne had been a boy, would the publication house have deleted sections on discovering his body? On his thoughts about a girl? Would his thoughts about his parents be written off as just a “boy being a boy”?

This is what made me uncomfortable enough to boycott the book.

Anne’s father, Otto Frank, was on board for some of the edits, and according to Otto himself, he made these changes with Anne’s own desires in mind: “Of course Anne didn’t want certain things to be published. I have evidence of it . . . Anne’s diary is for me a testament. I must work in her sense. So I decided how to do it through thinking how Anne would have done it. Probably she would have completed it as I did for a publisher.”

But if she wouldn’t have wanted those entries published, then why did she include them in version B at all? Version B was her own re-working, after all, so everything in that version is what she wanted people to see. What evidence did Anne’s father have that she would want her work sanitized?

With these questions in mind, I asked several writers and readers about their opinion on the editing of Anne Frank’s diary. Did the changes and redactions dilute its value? Did they justify simply not reading the book at all?

Some people I talked to agreed with me: “The idea of censoring Anne Frank goes completely against that important principle of telling the truth through the eyes of direct witnesses,” said Erin Stewart, a journalist. “Especially since I think some of the more powerful aspects of her diary (at least for me) are the minutiae, the fact that even trapped in this dank, cramped, precarious place, she had normal feelings about her relationships and life generally. She was still herself. There’s something really moving about the endurance of identity in those times and something terribly heartbreaking about diluting that.”

But the Jewish writers and readers I spoke to emphasized the significance of the diary, in whatever form it’s available. “As a Jewish reader who has read this book since childhood, I don’t agree with not reading it at all because it’s been edited,” said Alana Saltz, a Jewish writer and avid reader. “I do understand your frustration, and I think it’s unfortunate that the book was censored that way. However, you can’t dispute the power and historical impact it’s had in bringing awareness to the Holocaust, and so even if it’s not ideal and should be challenged in the future and questioned now, not reading it seems too extreme.”

After talking to Alana, I started to realize that the bigger picture was more important than any editing shadiness. The edits may be sexist, but fighting anti-Semitism — including by facing and examining what happened during the Holocaust — is more important.

But it doesn’t have to be a choice between accepting the bowdlerized diary and ignoring it altogether. I discovered that there is apparently an unabridged version of the diary that has not been altered the way other versions have, published under the name The Critical Edition. This edition offers side-by-side looks at the three versions, so readers can understand what’s been changed. In my opinion, this is the version that should be available in schools. This would allow us to critique the edits, and acknowledge the misogyny that fueled them, without boycotting the book.

While the edits are offensive, we can’t let that hold us back from learning more about what Anne, and millions of other Jewish people, went through during those painful years. If like myself, you’ve been putting off reading the book, I urge you to join me in giving it a chance. And if you’ve already read it, maybe pick up the Critical Edition and take another look.

By Chelsea Cristene

1997: The girls at school collect Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers. We line them up on one of our desks, form a circle, compare. The most basic come in standard fruit flavors like lime and watermelon. Some, like my frosty blue snowflake gloss from a holiday collection, are laden with sparkles. The rarest offer subtle tints of red for cherry or coffee brown for mocha.

We enjoy trading our Smackers and wearing them on keychains. We enjoy that they make our lips soft and smell like the felt-tip markers in art class.

My Christian friend who goes to a church where people cry out in a strange tongue is not allowed to play with them. But it’s clear, I protest, swiping a stick across the back of my hand. I snap open the heart-shaped latch to my plastic cosmetics case and point to my Tinkerbell set with the peel-off nail polish.

At the pool, my friend wears an oversized T-shirt so that no one will see her body. She sits cross-armed while I dab Tinkerbell cologne on my wrist, dreaming of when I will have a real glass perfume bottle with a fancy top like my mother’s.

Years later, I will wonder which one of us was oppressed.

***

1999: The neighbor girls’ mother is a Mary Kay consultant. We sneak into her trove of products and find the cardstock samples, each stamped with the signature rose. Deciding to revive the 1980s, I scamper home with a navy blue square of eyeshadow and sweep it across my lids. My mother opens the bathroom door and stifles a laugh. “Next year when you’re 13,” she says, slipping the sample out of my hands. “I’ll teach you.”

My friends next door aren’t allowed to wear “real” makeup either, but that doesn’t stop us from playing with the samples. We arrange them in meticulous spectral order. We read their names and imagine ourselves as women in Mary Kay’s creative department, trading ideas drawn from the shades of our lovers’ lips.

The older sister waves us upstairs to her bedroom vanity. She knows how, she says, from watching the other girls at school. But a finger slips. The cosmic hunter green powder meets her off-white carpet, and even in our frenzy to clean up, we have the feeling that something precious is lost in the fibers.

***

2005: I discover bareMinerals, a line of weightless and natural cosmetics. My skin feels healthy, thoroughly covered but not caked-upon as with some of the shinier and goopier brands. Here I am, I think, exploring the emerging contours of my face.

“You should wear less makeup,” my college boyfriend suggests. “Or no makeup. I feel like I can’t see you.”

I’m confused. My cosmetics are as much a part of me as my clothes, though he finds those objectionable too, depending on their cut and elasticity. “Who are these for?” he asks, his hand on the tight backside of my jeans. I am no longer the narrator of this scene, whose perspective now alternates between my incredulous partner and a series of real or imagined threats.

Unhappily, I keep my face bare on the weekends I visit him. Style is one of the central elements, like literature and music, firmly anchoring my gently-pliable identity. My act of quiet rebellion is hidden from him when I arrive to morning class powdered, mascaraed, and coiffed. Hoodies and flip flops never felt like me.

Realizing that my boyfriend is in love with a version of me that doesn’t exist, I say goodbye. But as I turn new corners, others continue to remove me from the narrative of my own body.

A crunchy granola lesbian in Queer Theory posits that I can’t be a feminist because I wear high heels and red lipstick — emblems of the patriarchy. Once I graduate and move back home, I arrive at the local bars with my face painted. Fingers lift my hem, dance across the stones of my necklace. “What are you all dressed up for? This place is a dive.”

I will learn that this is called “trying too hard.”

As more and more responsibilities fill the leisurely recesses of my life, there are also times when I prefer to appear in public without makeup. My presence at the grocery store is not an act of self-expression or integration into a scene. Still, when I bump into someone I know like this, they ask if I’m all right. They say I look tired.

I will learn that this is called “letting yourself go.”

2016: One sleepy Saturday morning, I stare into the bathroom mirror of our rented beach house. My skin is dewy after a quick wash in the sink. I could be featured in one of those “Your Favorite Celebrities Without Makeup” spreads, if I were anyone’s favorite celebrity. I slip on my bathing suit and greet my current boyfriend, never having wondered what he thinks about me with makeup or without.

I wiggle my toes into the Carolina sand and open Peggy Orenstein’s best-seller, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, an analysis of the princess-ification of American girls through the lenses of consumer culture and child psychology. My eyes dart back over a few borrowed lines from Susan J. Douglas’ Enlightened Sexism:

We can excel in school, play sports, go to college, aspire to — and get — jobs previously reserved for men, be working mothers, and so forth. But in exchange we must obsess about our faces, weight, breast size, clothing brands, decorating, perfectly calibrated child-rearing, about pleasing men and being envied by other women.

It’s a contract I never signed. Fussing over trifles to hold our places in the old boys’ club, like Ariel exchanging her voice for legs. Culture shapes identity. Culture shapes behavior. But I cannot accept my glittering washes of rainbow dust all carefully selected, all having brought me a thrilling jolt upon their purchase, as mere patriarchal assimilation. I dig my hands around in the colors and transform. I imagine new ways of being in the world. I reject the insistence that a woman can’t choose what makes her feel beautiful without regard for the judgement of others.

One creates oneself, Grace Jones says.

Later that month, my mother’s face wavers as I emerge wearing a shade of plum-black lipstick, just one of my recent splurges among tubes of silver-grey, neon orange, sunny coral. When I was a compliant teenager leaning into her hands as they pressed liner to my eyes, showing me how to dramatically define their almond shape, I’m not sure she had this look in mind.

“That’s different,” she says.

That’s the idea. I join my best friend at the gay club and we twirl to the pulse, the colored lights dancing over our bodies.

***

This piece originally appeared on Role Reboot and is republished here with permission.

Lead image: flickr/xtina5645