Yes, The Diary of a Young Girl Is Banned!

Anne Frank began her diary on June 12, 1942, her 13th birthday, and kept writing until August 1, 1944, three days before the Nazis discovered the Secret Annex in Amsterdam where her family had been hiding. She died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945, at age 15. Her father Otto, the only family member to survive, published her diary in 1947. It has since been translated into more than 70 languages and sold over 30 million copies.

The first challenge came in 1982 in Wise County, Virginia, where parents objected to passages about Anne’s anatomy, her romantic feelings for a female friend, and her emerging sexuality. In 2013, a parent in Michigan challenged the unexpurgated “Definitive Edition” over passages about Anne’s body. In 2022, Keller ISD in Texas temporarily pulled the book from shelves following a challenge, though it was later reinstated. The graphic novel adaptation of the diary has faced even more aggressive bans, with a parent in Florida’s Indian River County claiming it “minimized the Holocaust,” and the district agreeing the adaptation was “a fictional novel” (it isn’t).

Why You Should Read This

Anne Frank was 13 years old, trapped in an attic, and she wrote about everything: her parents’ marriage, her first crush, her body, her fear. She wrote about all of it because she was a teenager and that’s what teenagers do. The people who want to remove the passages about her sexuality are asking a dead girl to be less honest about her life.

The diary works because Anne wasn’t trying to write a historical document. She was trying to survive boredom, terror, and adolescence all at once. She gets annoyed with her mother. She falls in love with Peter. She worries about her hair. She is relentlessly, stubbornly alive on every page, which makes knowing how the story ends almost unbearable.

Otto Frank spent the rest of his life sharing his daughter’s words. The least we can do is let people read them.