Diary of Anne Frank, hot blonde

The story of Anne Frank, as popularized by her posthumously published “Diary of a Young Girl,” has brought the story of her and family’s ultimately deadly travails during WWII Europe to readers around the world, and has done much to increase Holocaust awareness internationally.

However, in one country — South Korea — it seems a publisher went a little too far, releasing an edition that features on the cover, instead of Frank’s winsome visage, a peroxide blond in a sultry pose reminiscent of early pin-up girls.

The cover was evidently used in an edition released several decades ago, but recently has been making the rounds on the Internet, according to a Thursday piece in Kotaku, a gaming site that is part of the Gawker empire.

According to the report, a blogger recently publicized the cover on Twitter, which set off a flurry of online recriminations and questions in South Korea, where many users seem to be aware of how Frank really looked.

Although the text of “Diary of a Young Girl” is under international copyright, bootleg editions and translations abound, and it is likely that the strange cover was the work of an unscrupulous publishing company trying to make a quick buck.

In an unrelated incident, in February hundreds of copies of “Diary of a Young Girl” were defaced in Tokyo libraries.