Translations of Anne Frank's Diary Quiz

Answer: The Secret Annexe

To give its full title, it was "Het Achterhuis - Dagboekbrieven 14 juni 1942 - 1 augustus 1944". Translated to English it is "The Secret Annexe: Diary letters June 14, 1942 - August 1, 1944"

Anne started writing in the diary that she had been given for her 13th birthday. On May 11, 1994 she wrote "after the war I'd like to publish a book called The Secret Annexe. It remains to be seen whether I'll succeed, but my diary can serve as the basis." It was from this entry that the published diary took its name.

Answer: German

Miep Gies, one of the people who had kept the families hidden and fed in the annexe, recovered Anne's diary and notebooks from the floor of the annexe, hoping to return them to her one day. When Anne's death was confirmed in the summer of 1945 she handed the diaries to Otto Frank.

Otto described himself as lacking the strength to read them at first but once he did, he could not put them down. He realised that they would be valuable for Anne's wider family to experience. So, he made a selection of passages to share and translated them from Dutch into German.

Answer: A was Anne's original diary. B was her re-written version

In 1944, Anne heard a radio broadcast on the BBC by Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile. In it he asked people to document their experiences during the German occupation. This inspired Anne to re-write her diaries in a newly edited form so it could be published after the occupation ended. Without the existence of version B, there would have been a significant gap in the story as at least one notebook from version A was not recovered from the annexe, covering the period from May to December 1943.

Otto realised from reading the diaries and notebooks that Anne wanted her story to be shared widely and that he was not breaching her privacy by doing so. He pieced together a narrative from the two versions that Anne had created and submitted it to publishers in the Netherlands.

Answer: Dear Kitty

Anne wrote her diary entries to a number of different people or characters during the first few months but by 1943 was writing exclusively to Kitty. Though no-one can know for certain who Kitty was, it appears likely that she was Kitty Francken, a character in the "Joop ter Heul" young adult novels written by Cissy van Marxveldt.

A strong indication of this was that Anne addressed her entries to other names of characters in the books in those early months.

Answer: French

The French translation was by Tylia Caren and Suzanne Lombard and beat the German version into print by a matter of weeks. Though it was not a huge commercial success at first, it played a crucial role in the future success of the book in the United States, as it was this version that was read by two key figures in the diary's history, Judith Jones and Meyer Levin.

Jones, an employee at the publisher Doubleday, picked up an advanced copy from a pile that had been sent into their offices and rejected. She suggested it to her manager, who recommended it for publication. Levin, having first read the French edition, wrote a review of the American edition for "The New York Times" and his positive article prompted a significant upturn in sales.

Answer: The occupying force

When Anneliese Schütz's translation was published in 1950 it immediately drew ire from journalists and academics. As well as the toning down of some of Anne's criticisms of the Germans, in places such comments were removed altogether. An example is the entry where Anne talked of how the people in the annexe had rules about speaking quietly and only in the languages of "civilized people, so not German". The German translation changed it to speaking in "all cultured languages, but quietly".

Otto Frank defended the German translation, which despite the criticism did not always soften the text for German readership. He described how the translator had changed some text to be closer to what he thought Anne was trying to say, suggesting that he himself had played a part in the translation.

Answer: Diary of a Young Girl

The translation into English by Barbara Mooyaart-Doubleday is credited with making the diary the worldwide phenomenon that it subsequently became. Interest in the diaries in Germany and the Netherlands had begun to wane by 1952 and had the English translations not been published in the UK and the US, that might have been the limit of Anne's reach.

But the books took off spectacularly, especially in the US, where it became an important fixture in school libraries and syllabuses across the nation, reaching millions of readers.

Answer: Behind the bookcase

The entrance to the secret annexe in which Anne and her family were hidden was obscured by a bookcase in the offices of the company Opekta, owned by Otto Frank. It was in these offices that employees Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman continued to work for the pectin supply company during the day, while providing food and other supplies for the families above them in the evenings.

Miep stated that had she read the diaries that she retrieved from the annexe before handing them to Otto, she would have destroyed them as the employee helpers had been named within their pages, putting all of them in potential danger.

Answer: Russian

Ehrenburg was a renowned Soviet novelist and journalist who reported extensively on World War II. His articles were popular with soldiers on the Eastern front as they portrayed the Red Army as the good against the Nazis' evil, stirring patriotic fervour.

In 1944, he helped compile the "Black Book" which detailed the Nazi crimes of the holocaust within the Soviet Union. It was banned as anti-Soviet owing to its concentration on the persecution of Jews ahead of other Soviet citizens and was withheld from publication in full until 1980.

Answer: Arabic

The offices in which Anne, her family, the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer were hidden were made into a museum, called the Anne Frank House. The museum is the host of a library of Anne's writings and translations of her diary from around the world. The diary has been translated into more than 70 languages, the most translated book in Dutch literary history.

It has worldwide sales of over 60 million copies.