How Anne Frank’s Private Diary Became an International Sensation

On June 25, 1947, the first version of Anne Frank's diary "Het Achterhuis" (The Secret Annex) was published in the Netherlands. From the text:

"Publishers were initially reluctant to publish the teenage author’s chronicle of life during the Holocaust. They thought readers were not ready to confront the horrors of World War II.
Usually, the upper floors of the office building at 263 Prinsengracht were silent. But on August 4, 1944, they came to terrible life. Miep Gies never forgot the sounds. “I could hear the sounds of our friends’ feet,” she wrote in her 1988 memoir. “I could tell from their footsteps that they were coming down like beaten dogs.”

Hours later, when she got up the courage, Gies went upstairs. She had helped her friends, the Frank family, live out of sight in the middle of Amsterdam for two years, bringing them the essentials of life as they hid from the persecution of Europe’s Jews. Now, the attic was trashed, ransacked by German police.

Then she saw it: a red checkered diary and years’ worth of papers strewn across the floor. Miep got on her hands and knees and gathered up the writing, then locked it in a drawer to wait for its author's return.

Anne Frank never came back. Within months of the arrest, the fifteen-year-old died of starvation and disease at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. But her diary outlived her.

Today, it is the Holocaust’s best-known and most widely read document, and its author is seen as a symbol of the 1 million Jewish children who were murdered during the Holocaust. The Diary of a Young Girl has sold more than 30 million copies, is required reading in many schools, and has been translated into more than 70 languages. The building where she hid draws over a million visitors each year. But how did the diary go from a pile of discarded papers to an international publishing phenomenon that still shapes modern historical memory?"