September 10, 1998

Newfound Pages From Anne Frank's Diary Set Off Furor

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More on Anne Frank, including the original New York Times reviews of 'The Diary of a Young Girl'

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By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

ore than 50 years after they were written in a secret refuge from the Nazis, long-withheld pages from the diary of Anne Frank have given her story a new twist and set off a furor over exploitation of one of history's top best sellers, only recently republished in a supposedly "definitive" edition.

Anne Frank Fonds/Anne Frank Stiftung Amsterdam

The Frank Family, from left: Margot, Otto, Anne and Edith in Merwedeplein, Amsterdam, May 1941.

In the newfound entries -- actually five pages of diary revisions censored by Anne's father, Otto Frank -- Anne picks apart her parents' strained marriage, analyzes her own difficult relations with her mother, Edith, and vows to keep the diary out of her family's hands as "none of their business."

"For a woman in love it cannot be easy to know that she will never occupy the first place in her husband's heart, and mother knew," Anne says. "Father appreciates mother and loves her, but not with the kind of love that I envisage for a marriage."

As for her diary, Anne says, "I shall also take care that nobody can lay hands on it."

The pages, augmenting one of the world's best-known books, published in 56 languages, were given last year to an Austrian writer, Melissa Muller, researching the first biography of the Jewish girl in Amsterdam, Netherlands, who put an indelible human face on the Holocaust.

But in another peculiar twist, Ms. Muller, a 31-year-old Austrian journalist, is now seeing her new book, "Anne Frank: the Biography" (Metropolitan Books), come out with paraphrases and selected quotes from the unpublished material while plans are being advanced for updated editions of the diary to contain the new material in full.

A television biography, "Anne Frank: The Missing Pages," based on Ms. Muller's book, is scheduled for broadcast on Tuesday with shots of the pages.

In a measure of how intense the maneuvering has become, an Amsterdam newspaper, Het Parool, published the disputed segments last month and also posted them on its web page on the Internet.

"For me this is terrible," Ms. Muller said in a series of telephone interviews from Europe amid a crossfire of recriminations.

At issue are diary revisions written by Anne as she and her family hid from the Germans in a secret annex over Otto Frank's busy preserves warehouse.

The missing entries, which were hinted at in a scholarly version of Anne's diary published in 1986, were supplied to Ms. Muller by Cornelis Suijk, international director of the Anne Frank Center USA at 584 Broadway in Manhattan and an intimate of Otto Frank.

Suijk (pronounced Sowk), a 74-year-old economist and Dutch government auditor with 33 years of affiliations with Anne Frank organizations in Amsterdam and the United States, said Frank had given him the pages shortly before his death at 91 in 1980, during a German police inquiry aimed at authenticating the diary in the face of neo-Nazi claims it was a forgery.

By Suijk's account, Frank wanted to be able to say honestly that he no longer had any diary material in his possession, without revealing anything potentially embarrassing to him or his second wife, Fritzi, whom he had married in 1953. He also wanted to avoid any debate over whether he had done the right thing in publishing Anne's diary in 1947.

"We knew that something was missing but we had no idea who had it," said Bernd Elias, Anne's cousin and last living relative and chairman of the Anne Frank Fonds, or foundation, in Basel, Switzerland, which holds the copyright on the diary and receives the revenue from publication.

The pages themselves are being claimed by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, to which Otto Frank bequeathed custody of the diary. It has asked Suijk to turn them over but he is claiming a onetime publication right of his own under Swiss law. He has also sought a sponsor to buy the pages to raise money for his Anne Frank Center in New York.

In an interview, Elias said it was "absolutely illegal" for Suijk to have given the pages to Ms. Muller.

Suijk, in turn, faulted the foundation for amassing what he said was at least $20 million in royalties from the diary without properly sharing them with Anne Frank causes around the world, including his own center, which runs education programs on the Holocaust.

Ms. Muller said the Swiss foundation was initially enthusiastic over her findings and only withdrew support after she declined to submit her manuscript for review. The biography includes new information that for the first time points a strong finger of suspicion at a cleaning woman, Lena van Bladeren Hartog, now dead, who may have tipped off the Germans to the Jewish family in hiding. Ms. Muller said that by going over old police reports she found that the woman had never been confronted with discrepancies in accounts of her discovery of Jews hiding in the building. The woman was angry too over her son's death in the German navy.

Ms. Muller, who divides her time between Vienna, Austria, and Munich, Germany, came to her biography as a freelance journalist who wrote extensively on childhood. As she recounted, she had no hint of Suijk's secret when she sought him out, particularly for information on Anne's mother, Edith Hollander, of whom little had been written -- even by Anne.

It was, she told Suijk, as if "Anne Frank had no mother."

That insight and her other research into the family tree so impressed him, he said, that he decided to work closely with her. Still, he said, he met with her for 11 months before deciding to reveal the pages of missing diary material -- three sides of two blue sheets and both sides of a salmon-colored sheet.

According to Ms. Muller's biography, Otto Frank had been intensely in love with a wealthy young woman in Frankfurt whose parents ruled out the marriage on financial grounds, leaving him heartbroken and devoid of passion for Edith, as Anne may have learned.

In the diary revision on the blue sheets, dated Feb. 8, 1944, when she was 14, Anne, addressing her fictional friend Kitty, talks about going through a period of reflection centering on her parents' marriage, always presented to her as "ideal."

But she says she knows "a thing or two" about her father's past and, supplemented by her imagination, concludes that her father married her mother because "he deemed her the right person to be his wife."

"I must say that I admire my mother for the way she has filled that position without a murmur and without jealousy, as far as I can tell," Anne continues.

Farther along she says, "Father is not in love, he gives her a kiss the way he kisses us."

As for her mother, Anne says: "Quite possibly because of her great sacrifice Mother has grown hard and disagreeable toward her surroundings and, consequently, she will drift further and further away from the path of love, will gain less and less admiration and, no doubt, Father will eventually come to realize that because externally she has never claimed his full love, she has crumbled away bit by bit internally. She loves him more than anybody else and it is hard to see this kind of love unanswered time and again."

Hence, she says, shouldn't she feel compassion for her mother? "Should I help her? And my father?"

No, she decides. Her mother has never told Anne about herself, nor has Anne asked her to; she describes a silence of near strangers. "I am unable to talk with her, I cannot look lovingly into those cold eyes. I cannot, never! -- If she had only one aspect of an understanding mother, either tenderness or kindness, or patience or something else, I would keep trying to approach her. But, as the days go by, I find myself more and more unable to love this insensitive nature and mocking countenance. Yours Anne."

The salmon-colored sheet was Anne's revision of an introduction to the diary. Promising to be a diligent diarist, she says, "I shall also take care that nobody can lay hands on it." Her parents and her sister Margot may be confidants, she says, "yet my diary and the secrets I share with my friends are none of their business."

Anne's diary is really a succession of books and loose pages. She had been given an autograph book, bound in red-and-green checkered cloth and secured with a simple key-less lock, for her 13th birthday, on June 12, 1942, a month before the family went into hiding.

Within six months, Anne had filled the makeshift diary, going on to a second notebook, which was lost, and two following notebooks. These became known as version "A."

After hearing a Dutch radio broadcast urging citizens to preserve their histories of the war, Anne, over a period of two and a half months starting in May 1944, feverishly began revising her diary, re-writing 324 pages, perhaps as as the basis for a novel. This became known as version "B."

After the annex was raided that August, Anne's writings were preserved by a downstairs secretary and friend who had bravely kept their secret, Miep Gies, now 89. When Otto Frank, liberated at the Auschwitz death camp, returned to Amsterdam and learned that Anne and her elder sister Margot had died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945, weeks before the British liberation, she presented him the diaries.

Otto Frank released a heavily edited version of "B" for its first publication as "Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl" in 1947. That became known as version "C."

In 1986, the Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam, which had been given custody of the diaries, published a so-called critical edition, comparing the versions, with scientific analysis, to refute any claims they were forgeries.

A footnote to the "A" version acknowledged the omission, at the family's request, of a 47-line segment that gave "an extremely unkind and particularly unfair picture of her parents' marriage." But in the "B" version there was no mention of anything missing -- the 47 lines of revisions Frank withheld.

In 1995, Doubleday, now part of Random House, came out with a "definitive edition" timed to the 50th anniversary of Anne's death and including 30 percent more material than Otto Frank had allowed for the originally published "C" version. But the definitive edition also lacked the revised entries that have now emerged.

Stuart Applebaum, senior vice president at Random House, said "we are as disturbed and nonplussed as anybody" but said any move to republish the book with the missing material would have to await a resolution of the legal claims. "It's impossible for us to get beyond the rancor now," he said. Doubleday, which has North American hardcover publication rights to the diary, and Bantam, which has paperback rights, would not expect to pay additional money to republish with the new material, he said.

Peter Romijn, head of research for the Institute for War Documentation, said that as it happened, a new printing of the critical edition had been planned anyway and now should include the new material.

Ms. Muller said she learned only in June that she would not be given permission to quote the new material in her book, a decision she attributed to commercial considerations as well as a misguided effort to protect Otto Frank.

"It's not terrible that a 36-year-old man may have had an earlier love," she said. Besides, she said, "I don't care what their marriage was like. I care about the relationship of mother and daughter."