Dutch researchers find 'dirty jokes' in hidden pages of Anne Frank's diary

‘Dirty jokes’ have been found on previously unseen pages of Anne Frank’s diary.

Dutch researchers have deciphered four risqué jokes and an explanation about sex, contraception and prostitution while using digital editing techniques to look at the famed diary.

“Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile,” said 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, who was aged 13 at the time, wrote the two pages on September 28 1942.

In the passage on sex, Anne described how a young woman gets her period around age 14, saying that it is “a sign that she is ripe to have relations with a man but one doesn’t do that of course before one is married”.

On prostitution, she wrote: “All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together. In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there.”

The diary entries were made 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, possibly through fear of prying eyes, she covered them over with brown paper.

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

Experts on Anne’s diary said the newly discovered text, when studied together with the rest of her diary, reveals more about Anne’s development as a writer than it does about any interest in sex.

Mr Leopold said the jokes and sexual musings are similar to other passages on the topic that have already been published in the diary.

The deciphering was done by researchers from the Anne Frank museum, the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Huygens Institute of Netherlands History.

They photographed the pages, backlit 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.

Anne wrote in her diary while she and her family hid for more than two years during the Second World War.

The family went into hiding in July 1942 and remained there, provided with food and other essentials by a close-knit group of helpers, until August 4 1944, when they were discovered and ultimately deported to Auschwitz.

Only Anne’s father, Otto Frank, survived the war. Anne and her sister died in Bergen-Belsen camp. Anne was just 15 when she died.

After the war, Otto Frank had his daughter’s diary published, and it went on to become a symbol of hope and resilience that has been translated into dozens of languages.

The house where the Franks hid was turned into a museum that is one of Amsterdam’s major tourist attractions.