Newly discovered pages of Anne Frank’s diary have revealed that her uncle could have been gay.
The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam have said they used new technology to uncover what was written on two pages they thought were lost to time.
The two pages were covered with ‘brown gummed paper’. They did not want to remove the top layer and end up destroying the pages.
Uncovering pages of Anne Frank’s diary
So in order to see what the young Holocaust victim had written, researchers came up with a new plan.
The museum ‘photographed the pages, back-lit by a flash and then used image-processing software to decipher the words, which were hard to read because they were jumbled up with the writing on the reverse sides of the pages’.
And they discovered a few jokes, the girl’s thoughts on sexuality, and a passage talking about her uncle’s sexuality.
‘A man had a very ugly wife and he didn’t want to have relations with her,’ she wrote. ‘One evening he came home and then he saw his friend in bed with his wife, then the man said: He gets to and I have to!!!!!’
Another joke she had heard: ‘Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in Holland? As mattresses for the soldiers.’
In that latter passage, she says:
‘All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together,’ she wrote. ‘In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there. Uncle Walter is not normal. Girls sell this.’
Revealing she was bisexual
The Diary of Anne Frank is a unique insight into World War 2. However, the book was edited and many sections were removed by Anne’s father.
One passage that was removed revealed that she was bisexual.
Despite Anne never explicitly giving herself a label, the diary tells of her love for a boy named Peter and also a girl called Jacque.
‘Once when I was spending the night at Jacque’s, I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she’d always hidden from me and which I’d never seen.
‘I asked her whether, as proof of our friendship, we could touch each other’s breasts. Jacque refused. I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did. Every time I see a female nude, such as the Venus in my art history book, I go into ecstasy.
‘Sometimes I find them so exquisite I have to struggle to hold back my tears. If only I had a girlfriend!’
–The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
