The Anne Frank House announced this week that two previously covered over pages of the Jewish girl’s iconic diaries were found during a recent check-up, NPR reports. Covered by “brown gummed paper,” the pages were backlit by a flash during the review, alerting researchers that text was underneath them. Using software, they were able to decipher the writings, which included five crossed-out phrases, four dirty jokes and 33 lines discussing sexual education and prostitution.
“I’ll use this spoiled page to write down ‘dirty’ jokes,” one entry from Sept. 28, 1942 reads. She then writes about young women who begin to menstruate around age 14, “a sign that she is ripe to have relations with a man, but one doesn’t do that of course before one is married.”
Frank also scrawled notes about prostitution, NPR reports.”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.”
Frank van Vree, the director of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, told NPR: “Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile. The ‘dirty’ jokes are classics among growing children,” van Free said. “They make it clear that Anne, with all her gifts, was above all also an ordinary girl.”
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