On June 25, 1947, a small Dutch publisher named Contact released 3,036 copies of a book with a plain cover and a careful title: Het Achterhuis, or "The Secret Annex." Inside were the diary entries of a Jewish teenager named Anne Frank, who had hidden with her family in a hidden apartment in Amsterdam during World War II. The book had almost not been published at all. Several publishers had said no, telling Anne's father, Otto, that no one wanted to read sad memories from the war.
Otto had been the only member of his family to survive the camps. When he came home in 1945, friends gave him Anne's notebooks, which they had saved from the floor of the secret annex. Otto sat down to read his daughter's words for the very first time - and was stunned by how sharp, funny, and grown-up she sounded. He spent two years gently editing the diary and looking for someone willing to print it. The first Dutch printing sold out in a few months. By 1952, the diary was being read in English, German, French, and Japanese. By 1955, it had been turned into a play that won a Pulitzer Prize. A movie followed in 1959.
Today the Diary of a Young Girl has been translated into more than 70 languages and sold tens of millions of copies. The little redand-white-checked notebook itself sits in a glass case at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, where more than a million visitors come each year. A girl who once worried no one would remember her became one of the most-read writers of the 1900s - and one of the most beloved voices of any century.
