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“I’ll use this spoiled page to write down ‘dirty’ jokes,” Anne Frank wrote in her diary in September 1942, during her first few months in hiding. Since writing that, it appears she decided to keep both her jokes about sex and her thoughts about prostitution and contraception secret from her family, as she pasted brown paper over the pages to conceal them.
However, over 75 years later, researchers have now been able to read the pages using new scanning technology, the Anne Frank House announced on Tuesday.
The pages reveal Frank as a teenager with normal thoughts about what she referred to as "sexual matters", as well as a good sense of humor in terrible circumstances.
Researchers from the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands helped scan the pages in order to finally reveal what they said. They photographed the pages with flash and used image-processing software to decipher the words, which were being obscured by writing on the other side.
One reason she may have wanted to hide the pages from her family could be her writing about prostitutes, which includes special reference to her father.
“All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together," she wrote. "In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there."
In the texts were several jokes about sex, including:
"Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in Holland? As mattresses for the soldiers."
And:
“A man had a very ugly wife and he didn't want to have relations with her. One evening he came home and then he saw his friend in bed with his wife, then the man said: `He gets to and I have to!!!"'
Another joke involves a husband who thinks his wife is cheating on him coming home and searching the house, The Straits Times reports. When the husband finds another naked man in a wardrobe, he asks the naked man what he's doing there.
"Believe it or not, I'm waiting for the tram," he replies.
"Anne Frank writes about sexuality in a disarming way," Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House, said in a statement. "Like every adolescent she is curious about this subject. She also writes about it on other, uncovered pages."
The Anne Frank House, who released the images of the pages, wrote on Twitter: "Over the decades Anne Frank has grown to become the worldwide symbol of the Holocaust, and Anne the girl has increasingly faded into the background.
"These uncovered texts from her diary bring the inquisitive and in many respects precocious teenager back into the foreground."
"They bring us even closer to the girl and the writer Anne Frank,” said Leopold.
