Two never-before-seen pages from Anne Frank’s famous diary have just been published, after digital imaging techniques made deciphering their contents possible.
The pages contain four “dirty jokes” and an explanation of sex, contraception and prostitution, the ABC reports, which were covered with gummed pieces of brown paper when the diary was first found – presumably Anne’s attempt to conceal her risqué writing from her family.
“I’ll use this spoiled page to write down ‘dirty’ jokes,” a 13-year-old Anne wrote on a page with crossed-out sentences. The entries were dated 28 September 1942.
One of the jokes reads as follows: “Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in the Netherlands? As mattresses for the soldiers.”
The BBC reports that the pages also contain Anne’s musings on giving “the talk” to someone else, and reveal that her father had told her what prostitutes were.
“Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to supress a smile,” Frank van Vree, director of the Netherlands Institute for War Holocaust and Genocide Suicides, has said. “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 wrote her diary while in hiding from the Nazis with her family during World War II. After two years, they were discovered and sent to Nazi concentration camps, where Anne died of typhoid in 1945.
Her only surviving family member, her father, published her diary in 1947.
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