Anne Frank wrote for two years. She has been read for nearly eighty.

Anne received an album with a red and white checked cloth cover for her thirteenth birthday, on June 12, 1942. She began writing in it immediately.

Less than a month later, the family went into hiding.

Over the next two years she filled that album and then continued on loose sheets. Then on March 28, 1944 the exiled Dutch education minister broadcast an appeal on Radio Oranje for people to keep their wartime diaries and letters. Anne heard it, and in May she began rewriting her own earlier entries, editing them, reworking them, shaping them for an audience. She had heard that wartime diaries might be collected and published after the liberation, and she intended hers to be among them.

So scholars distinguish between the original entries she wrote as she lived them, her own later reworking of that material, and the edited version published after the war. The diary is not a single innocent artifact. It is a young writer's project, interrupted.

Her father Otto, the only one of the eight people in hiding to survive, prepared the text that was first published in Dutch in 1947 as Het Achterhuis. It has since been translated into dozens of languages and read by tens of millions of people.

Roughly 107,000 Jews were deported from the Netherlands. About 5,000 came back. Proportionally it was the deadliest Jewish community in Western Europe.

The route ran through Westerbork, a camp in the north-east of the country that the Dutch government had originally built in 1939 to hold Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. The occupiers took it over and turned it into the assembly point for deportation.

Westerbork had a school, a hospital, a cabaret and an orchestra. It also had a train timetable. Transports left, mostly on Tuesdays, for Auschwitz and Sobibor. The lists were drawn up in the camp. People spent each week hoping their name was not on one.

The Franks reached Westerbork in August 1944, after two years of hiding. Because they had been arrested in hiding they were classed as criminal cases and put in the punishment barracks, which meant harder labour and a worse position on the lists.

They were put on the transport of September 3, 1944. It was the last transport ever to leave Westerbork for Auschwitz.

Yes. It has been examined by a state forensic laboratory, tested in court repeatedly, and the manuscripts are public property held for the Dutch nation. Authenticity is not an open question among historians.

The manuscripts are not privately controlled. Otto Frank left his daughter's papers to the Dutch state. Stewardship passed to the national war documentation institute, and the originals have been on display at the Anne Frank House since 1986, on loan from the state. Anyone claiming a hidden original is describing something that does not exist.

The forensic examination was thorough and its conclusion was blunt. The Dutch judicial laboratory, now the Netherlands Forensic Institute, examined the manuscripts in the early 1980s at the state institute's request. The report runs more than 250 pages, most of it a detailed handwriting comparison alongside a forensic document analysis. Its conclusion was that both versions of the diary were written by Anne Frank between 1942 and 1944, and that allegations of authorship by anyone else were conclusively refuted. An independent German graphological examination in 1960 had already reached the same finding in a 131-page report. The paper and the iron-gall ink were confirmed as materials in common use before 1950.

The famous "ballpoint pen" claim has a name attached to it. No ballpoint writing appears anywhere in the diary text. Examiners found ballpoint on exactly two loose note slips left among the pages by previous researchers, in handwriting plainly not Anne's. In 1987 the slips were identified as the notes of a member of the 1960 German handwriting team. The German federal police agency whose 1980 report had seeded the myth stated publicly in 2006 that its report gives no basis whatsoever for doubting the diary's authenticity.

When five unknown sheets surfaced in 1998 they were tested, not simply accepted. The forensic institute concluded the writing matched Anne Frank's with a probability bordering on certainty, the highest grade of identification it issues. Only then were they added to the state-held manuscripts and printed.

And the courts kept testing it. Lübeck in 1961, where the accused withdrew their allegations after the handwriting evidence and said they were now convinced the diary was genuine. Frankfurt in 1978, which barred a neo-Nazi publisher from calling it a forgery. Amsterdam in 1998, upheld in 2000, which banned a revisionist distributor. In 2000 the High Court in London declared David Irving, who had promoted the forgery claim, a Holocaust denier and antisemite. Irving conceded he had never read the whole diary.

The strongest argument, though, is the one people overlook: the scholarship publishes its own gaps. A notebook covering part of 1943 was lost and has never been recovered. Anne herself cut passages when she rewrote. Otto Frank set sheets aside. All of it is documented, and since 1986 the different versions have been printed side by side so any reader can see precisely what each layer of editing did. Since 2021 the manuscripts themselves are online. A forgery does not publish its own seams.

"I had a little pocket calendar, and I thought to myself, not too much is happening, but I should write it down so I can tell my parents later."

She met Gisela Zoenlein in the summer of 1941, at the one Jewish youth camp still allowed to run. Gisela was the camp leader. Two years later she was the woman who came to the fourth-floor flat in the Amsterdam ghetto where a thirteen-year-old was waiting alone, walked her to the railway station, and took her to a village called Acht near Eindhoven. Acht is the Dutch word for eight. The house number was 888.

She stayed hidden there from May 1943 until September 1944, living with the knowledge that the woman next door had already been caught hiding someone. One night a police car stopped outside and she was certain it was over. It was somebody's brother.

Her parents were taken, held first in the jail at Scheveningen, and then, in her words, put four days in an animal car without water, without toilets, until they hit Westerbork. Anne Frank passed through the same transit camp. What happened next Anita describes simply: there was a railroad strike, so they never left Westerbork until after the liberation. Whatever the full explanation, the transports out of Westerbork stopped, and her parents were still there when the war ended.

She was liberated in September 1944 when the south of Holland fell to the Allies. Her sister found her; it took until December before they were together again. Anne Frank's diary ends because she was killed. Anita's testimony continues because a train did not leave. Both facts belong in the same lesson.