New edition of Anne Frank diary 'brings the reader closer to her'

BERLIN: A new edition of the diaries of Jewish teenager Anne Frank, based more closely on her incomplete manuscript before she was sent to her death in a Nazi concentration camp, will be published on Saturday.

She and her family hid from the Nazis in a secret annexe in a house in Amsterdam during World War Two but were discovered in 1944. She died aged 15 at Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

Her diary was published two years later and is still being read worldwide 75 years after she wrote it.

But at a presentation in Berlin, Holocaust survivor Laureen Nussbaum, who knew the Franks, told Reuters Television that the new edition is what Anne Frank had intended to publish in the first place.

Nussbaum, born Hannelore Klein, knew Anne and her family when they lived in Amsterdam during World War Two. She and Anne were not close friends, Nussbaum said, but they rehearsed a play together in 1941.

Anne Frank made two diaries - her original journal and a revised version, reworked after she learned of plans to collect diaries and other papers to document the war period.

"This is the book that Anne wanted to write and to publish," Nussbaum, 91, said of the new edition, which will be published in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The version published since 1947 is Anne Frank's father's "amalgam of the original diary entries with the new version and it's kind of a mixture", Nussbaum said.

The new edition, entitled "Liebe Kitty" (Dear Kitty), is an incomplete manuscript "of a girl who wanted to become an author", according to Amsterdam's Anne Frank House museum.

The museum calls the work "the creative and literary choices Anne has made" and "brings the reader closer to the writer Anne Frank".