Das Hinterhaus – Het Achterhuis: Die Tagebücher von Anne Frank

by Anne Frank

“Anne è sempre allegra. Ama fare scherzi. A volte ti piomba di sorpresa alle spalle e ti fa prendere uno spavento posandoti di colpo le mani sulle spalle, scuotendoti forte e gridando: Buuuu! E poi tutto a un tratto è capace di mettersi a raccontare le solite esagerazioni sui suoi numerosi amori…”. Questa è la descrizione di una ragazza ebrea, Anne Frank, che a soli tredici anni è costretta a vivere l’incubo dello sterminio degli ebrei perpetrato dal nazismo e che, per salvarsi, si rinchiude con la sua famiglia e altri conoscenti in un rifugio segreto. Una ragazza come tante, con i propri sogni e i propri problemi, che suo malgrado vive in un tempo e in un luogo dove il futuro ha i giorni contati. Questo che pubblichiamo è il suo famoso Diario, o meglio, la raccolta dei tre diari nella versione autentica, non pensata per la pubblicazione e non rivista da altri che non fossero la loro stessa creatrice. In questa versione originale, appare il Diario per quello per cui è stato inizialmente concepito da Anne: un sostegno, un confidente muto ma presente delle confessioni più intime di una ragazzina costretta a crescere “in cattività”. “A me proprio non riesce costruire tutto sulla morte, sulla povertà, sulla confusione, osservo il mondo e vedo come lo stanno trasformando sempre più in un deserto, sento sempre più forte il rombo che si avvicina e ucciderà anche noi, sento il dolore di milioni di persone e nonostante questo quando guardo il cielo so che andrà tutto bene, che questa crudeltà avrà una fine e nel mondo tornerà la calma e la pace. Nel frattempo, devo conservare al meglio i miei ideali, perché forse in futuro si potranno realizzare!” (Anne M. Frank, sabato 15 luglio 1944)

480 pages, Hardcover

Published May 8, 2019

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Annelies Marie Frank was a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary documenting her life in hiding amid Nazi persecution during the German occupation of the Netherlands. A celebrated diarist, Frank described everyday life from her family's hiding place in an Amsterdam attic. She gained fame posthumously and became one of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust with the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl (originally Het Achterhuis in Dutch, lit. 'the back house'; English: The Secret Annex), which documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944. It is one of the world's best-known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.
Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929. In 1934, when she was four-and-a-half, Frank and her family moved to Amsterdam in the Netherlands after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control over Germany. By May 1940, the family was trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands. Frank lost her German citizenship in 1941 and became stateless. Despite spending most of her life in the Netherlands and being a de facto Dutch national, she never officially became a Dutch citizen. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Frank's father, Otto Frank, worked. The hiding place is notably referred to as the "secret annex". Until the family's arrest by the Gestapo on 4 August 1944, Frank kept and regularly wrote in a diary she had received as a birthday present in 1942.
Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps. On 1 November 1944, Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (presumably of typhus) a few months later. They were estimated by the Red Cross to have died in March, with Dutch authorities setting 31 March as the official date. Later research has alternatively suggested that they may have died in February or early March.
Otto, the only Holocaust survivor in the Frank family, returned to Amsterdam after World War II to find that Anne's diary had been saved by his secretaries, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Moved by his daughter's repeated wishes to be an author, Otto Frank published her diary in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch version and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl, and has since been translated into over 70 languages.