AP News, June 21st, 2007
Relatives of Anne Frank will loan a collection of photographs and letters to the museum housing the Jewish teenager's hiding place during World War II to mark next week's 60th anniversary of the publication of her diary.
The material, which comes from the Anne Frank archive in Basel, Switzerland, and from Anne's cousin, Buddy Elias, includes photos of Anne, her sister, Margot, her mother, Edith and her father, Otto, that have rarely or never been on public display.
The Netherlands NOS news reported Thursday that much of the material has been recently catalogued for the first time. Anne Frank Museum spokeswoman Patricia Bosboom confirmed the NOS report was accurate, but declined to comment further pending an announcement Monday.
Anne Frank wrote her diary while she and her family hid in a tiny annex to an Amsterdam warehouse for 25 months during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
The family was arrested in August 1944 and Anne died of typhus in March 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15. Her father, the family's only survivor of the camps, recovered the diary after the war and published it in Dutch on June 25, 1947, as "Het Achterhuis," or "The Annex."
It was translated into German, French and then English in 1952 as "The Diary of a Young Girl," which later became "The Diary of Anne Frank."
It has since been translated into dozens more languages and is the most widely read book on the Holocaust, making its author a symbol of the victims of the Nazi era.
