Dutch researchers uncover dirty jokes in Anne Frank’s diary

Researchers using digital editing techniques decipher the writing on two pages of Anne Frank’s diary that she had covered over with brown masking paper, discovering four risque jokes and a candid explanation of sex, contraception, and prostitution.

“Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile,” says Frank van Vree, director of the Netherlands Institute for War Holocaust and Genocide Studies. “The ‘dirty’ jokes are classics among growing children. They make it clear that Anne, with all her gifts, was above all also an ordinary girl.”

Anne, age 13 at the time, wrote the two pages on Sept. 28, 1942, less than three months after she, her family, and another Jewish family went into hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex behind a canal-side house in Amsterdam.

Later on, possibly fearing prying eyes or no longer liking what she had written, she covered them over with brown paper, and their content remained a tantalizing mystery for decades.

It turns out the pages contained four jokes about sex that Anne herself described as “dirty,” and an explanation of women’s sexual development, sex, contraception, and prostitution.

“They bring us even closer to the girl and the writer Anne Frank,” Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House museum, says Tuesday.

— AP