On the twelfth of June, nineteen forty two, a girl in Amsterdam turned thirteen and was given a present she had picked out herself in a shop window.
It was an autograph book, the sort friends write messages in, bound in red and white checked cloth with a small clasp on the front. She decided not to use it for autographs.
She wrote in it that she hoped she would be able to confide everything to it, and that she hoped it would be a great support.
Her name was Anne Frank, and this is the most read diary ever written, and the thing people most often forget about it is that it was written by an actual thirteen-year-old, who was funny, who was vain about her hair, who fought with her mother, and who thought her sister was insufferably good.
The family was German. Anne was born in Frankfurt in nineteen twenty nine, and the Franks left for Amsterdam in nineteen thirty three, when she was four, because of what was already happening in Germany.
So she grew up Dutch. She spoke Dutch at school and with her friends, and by the time she was ten she had a large and complicated social life involving a great many girls and a running commentary on all of them.
Then in May nineteen forty, Germany invaded the Netherlands, and over the next two years the rules arrived one at a time, each one small.
Jews had to hand in their bicycles. Jews could not use trams. Jews had to shop only between three and five in the afternoon. Jews could not go to the cinema, or the swimming pool, or sit in a public garden. Jews had to attend separate schools.
Anne wrote all of these down in a list, in the diary, in the tone of a girl finding something ridiculous rather than terrifying, which is exactly how a thirteen-year-old would find it, because it had happened slowly and each new rule was only slightly worse than the last.
On the fifth of July, nineteen forty two, a call-up notice arrived at the flat. It was for Anne's sister Margot, who was sixteen, ordering her to report for what was described as a labour camp in Germany.
The family went into hiding the following morning.
Otto Frank had been preparing a place for months without telling his daughters. It was at the back of the building where he ran his business, at Prinsengracht two hundred and sixty three, a narrow canal house with a warehouse below and offices in front.
Behind the offices, up a flight of stairs, were several rooms that faced onto the inner courtyard. The doorway to them was hidden by a bookcase on hinges, built by one of the warehouse staff.
Eight people ended up living in there. The four Franks; a colleague of Otto's, Hermann van Pels, with his wife Auguste and their son Peter, who was fifteen; and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer.
They were there for seven hundred and sixty-one days.
The diary is valuable because it is honest about how boring and irritating it was.
During office hours, which were most of the day, nobody in the annexe could use a tap, or a lavatory, or walk about, or speak above a whisper, because the warehouse staff below did not know they were there. So from morning until half past five, eight people sat still.
The curtains never opened. Anne wrote about missing the sky, and about standing at a gap in the curtain at night to look at the chestnut tree in the courtyard and a strip of blue.
They argued constantly. She is merciless about it and about herself. She thinks Mrs van Pels is vain and silly. She and the dentist fight over the use of a table. She writes that her mother does not understand her at all, and later writes, painfully, that she has been unfair.
She falls in love with Peter, in an on and off way, and analyses it in enormous detail, and then decides she has been rather silly about it.
And she reads, and studies, and takes a shorthand course by post under a false name, and works constantly at her writing, because the thing she wants more than anything is to be a journalist and a writer.
None of this could have happened for a fortnight, let alone two years, without the people downstairs.
Four employees of Otto Frank's company knew, and helped, every day: Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler.
The practical problem was food. Eight extra people had to be fed in a city under rationing, where everything required a coupon and where buying unusual quantities was exactly what neighbours noticed. Miep and the others bought from several different shops, in small amounts, using illegal ration books, and carried it in every day.
They also brought books, news, birthday presents, and library books chosen for people they could not be seen to know.
They were risking imprisonment daily for two years, on a normal working schedule, while also running a business. Miep Gies said afterwards, whenever anybody called her a hero, that she was not one, that she had simply done what any decent person would do, and that she was still ashamed she had not been able to save them.
Here is a thing about the diary that almost nobody knows, and it changes how you read it.
In March nineteen forty four, the annexe listened to a broadcast from the Dutch government in exile in London. A minister said that after the war they wanted to collect ordinary people's diaries and letters, so that there would be a record of what the occupation had actually been like.
Anne heard it and thought: mine.
So she started rewriting. She went back to the beginning, on loose sheets of paper, and edited her own diary into a book. She cut things. She improved sentences. She invented pseudonyms for everybody. She gave it a title, The Secret Annexe, and she was still working on it when the rewriting stopped in August.
That is why the diary reads as well as it does. It is not only a girl writing privately. It is a fifteen-year-old writer, working deliberately, revising her own material for an audience she expected to have.
On the morning of the fourth of August, nineteen forty four, a car pulled up outside and police went straight to the bookcase.
Nobody knows who told them. It has been investigated repeatedly, most recently by teams using modern techniques, and every answer offered so far has been contested. It is entirely possible it was not a betrayal at all but a raid for something else that stumbled on them.
All eight were taken. The helpers Kugler and Kleiman were arrested too.
Later that day, Miep Gies went back up into the empty rooms. The floor was covered in papers thrown down during the search, and among them were the red checked book and the loose sheets.
She gathered them all up and put them in a drawer of her desk, unread, because she intended to give them back to Anne when she returned.
Of the eight, one came back. Otto Frank survived and came to Amsterdam in June nineteen forty five and stayed with Miep while he tried to find his daughters. When the news came that Anne and Margot had died in a camp in Germany, within weeks of its liberation, Miep took the papers out of the drawer and handed them to him and said that this was his daughter's legacy.
The line everybody quotes is that in spite of everything, she still believed people were really good at heart. She did write it. She wrote it about three weeks before the arrest.
But she wrote a great many other things too, some of them far darker, and the habit of quoting only that one sentence has turned her into something gentler and simpler than she was. She was sharp, she was ambitious, she was frequently furious, and she was writing to be read.
Otto Frank published the diary in Dutch in nineteen forty seven, in a small print run, and it has since appeared in more than seventy languages. He spent the rest of his life answering letters from children who had read it, personally, thousands of them.
The chestnut tree she watched from the window stood until two thousand and ten, when it came down in a storm. Saplings grown from its seeds were sent to schools and memorials around the world, and some of them are now sizeable trees.
Here is something to think about tonight. She wanted, more than anything, to be a writer whose work outlived her, and she said so in the diary. She got exactly that, in the worst possible way. What do you think she would have made of it?