Oxford new pathways coursebook

This is the most famous diary in the world, and it earns the title. Anne turns history's largest crime into something small enough to hold: one bright, stubborn teenager arguing with her mother, falling for a boy, dreaming of the stage. Read it to meet a voice that outlived the people who tried to erase it—and to remember what hatred costs, one ordinary girl at a time.

1. 1

   Act 1

   A Thirteenth Birthday and a Choice

   June 1942: Anne Frank unwraps a birthday present and stops breathing for a second. It is a red-and-white-checked diary. She had pointed it out in a shop window days earlier, and now it is hers. Within weeks she fills its first page with a rule she sets for herself: she will only confide in it, because paper is patient and people are not. She names the diary Kitty, decides Kitty is a friend, and writes to her the way you write to someone who will never interrupt. School, boys, gossip, teachers who call her an incorrigible chatterbox—everything goes in. Then the pages darken. Anti-Jewish laws tighten around her family in Amsterdam: the yellow star, the curfews, the bans. Her sister Margot receives a call-up notice to report for a labour camp. The family had been preparing for this moment—packing in secret, spreading rumours of escape to Germany. On 6 July 1942, Anne puts on layers of clothing, several at once, because luggage would give them away, and walks away from her home for the last time. The diary comes with her.

2. 2

   Act 2

   Behind the Bookcase

   The hiding place is real and it is strange: rooms at the back of the office building where her father worked, joined by a doorway hidden behind a hinged bookcase. Anne calls it the Secret Annex. Eight people share it—the Frank family, the van Daans, Albert Dussel, a dentist who shares Anne's small room and drives her to distraction with his fussy ways. Daylight, movement, noise, a flush of the toilet: everything is rationed, because the office staff below must never suspect. During work hours the residents tiptoe, hold their breath, wait out the hours like prisoners. Helpers—Miep among them—bring food, books, news, and the gift of ordinary kindness. Anne writes through all of it: the air raids that send her running to her parents' bed, the quarrels with her mother that wound her deeply, her fierce love for her father, her growing tenderness for Peter van Daan in the attic. In the middle of it, she hears on the radio that diaries and wartime letters will be collected after the war. She resolves to publish a novel called Het Achterhuis—The Secret Annex—and begins rewriting her own diary into a book.

3. 3

   Act 3

   The Girl Inside the Writer

   Two years of hiding press down on everyone, and Anne's diary becomes the place where the pressure turns into thought. She is honest past the point of politeness: about her mother, whom she feels she cannot love; about Mrs. van Daan's vanity; about her own vanity, her moods, her sharp tongue. Then, alone in the dark with Peter, she experiences something she decides is happiness—just being near him, in silence. Around her the world closes in. News of the war arrives in scraps; invasion is hoped for, delayed, hoped for again. Burglars break into the warehouse below one night, and the terror of discovery becomes physical. Anne watches the adults crumble—quarrels over food, over the children's upbringing, over everything—and quietly decides she will not become like them. In April 1944 she writes the sentence the world now knows by heart: in spite of everything, she still believes people are truly good at heart. A month later, she writes that she sees the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, and hears the approaching thunder that will destroy her too—yet she looks up at the sky and feels that everything will change for the better. She is fifteen. She is writing for her life.

4. 4

   Act 4

   The Silence After

   On 4 August 1944, the diary stops mid-life. A truck pulls up, armed men in plain clothes enter the annex, and all eight hiding residents are arrested. The bookcase they hid behind for two years means nothing now. The helpers are left with the wreckage—and with Anne's papers, scattered on the floor, which Miep gathers and keeps in a drawer, unread, waiting for its owner to come back. Anne is deported, first to a transit camp, then on the last train to Auschwitz. She ends in Bergen-Belsen with Margot, where both sisters die of typhus in early 1945, weeks before the camp is liberated. Anne is fifteen. Her father, the only one of the eight to survive, returns to Amsterdam. Miep gives him the diary. He reads what his youngest daughter never let him read while she lived—and finds that the chatterbox he knew had become a writer. He publishes the book she had named and planned. The girl who wrote to be heard is heard by the whole world.

• AAnne FrankThe diary's author and its whole heart: a chatty, self-critical, wildly alive teenager who wants to be a writer and a good person. Two years in hiding forge her from a schoolgirl into a clear-eyed observer of others and herself—then the war takes her, and leaves the voice.
• OOtto FrankAnne's father, the calm centre of the annex and the person she loves most. He is the only resident to survive the camps, and the one who finally reads, edits and publishes her diary.
• MMargot FrankAnne's older sister: quiet, dutiful, the 'good' daughter Anne measures herself against. Her call-up notice is what forces the family into hiding; she dies in Bergen-Belsen with Anne.
• PPeter van DaanThe shy teenage boy in the attic who becomes Anne's first almost-love. Their quiet evenings together give her one of her few moments of pure happiness in hiding.
• MMiep GiesOne of the office helpers who keeps the annex fed and hidden for two years. She gathers Anne's scattered diary pages after the arrest and keeps them until Otto returns.
• FFritz Pfeffer (Dussel)The dentist who shares Anne's tiny room, a fussy presence she skewers in her entries. In the diary he appears under the name Dussel—Dutch for nitwit.
• EEdith FrankAnne's mother, whom Anne loves and resents in equal, painful measure. Their quarrels fill some of the diary's rawest pages.

The diary (Kitty)

The bookcase

The yellow star

The sky

The radio

The ending is a silence, and the book's power comes from what fills it. Anne's last entry is dated 4 August 1944; after that, the diary continues only as an object—scattered papers gathered by Miep, kept in a drawer, handed to Otto when he returns alone. Readers are left holding two truths at once: the girl who believed people were good at heart died in a camp built by people who were not, and the diary she wrote to be heard became the most-read testimony of the century. Some read the ending as tragedy that indicts the world Anne trusted; others read it as vindication—the voice won, the hunters did not get everything. Both readings are true, which is why the ending lands so hard: it refuses to comfort you, and it refuses to despair. The book you have just read is the answer to the ending—the publication Otto carried out for his daughter is the only victory available, and it is not a small one.

1. 1.Anne revises her diary for publication after hearing that wartime diaries will be collected. Does knowing an audience is coming change what 'private' writing means—and does it matter that she never finished the revision?
2. 2.Anne writes that she still believes people are truly good at heart while hiding from people hunting her family. Is this hope, discipline, or denial? What does the ending do to that sentence?
3. 3.The diary shows persecution arriving as a list of laws—the star, the curfews, the call-up notice. What does Anne's account teach about recognising hatred while it is still 'small print'?

Anyone old enough to ask what hatred does to ordinary lives—and every reader who has ever kept, or abandoned, a diary. Ideal for young readers meeting the Holocaust for the first time, and for adults who think they already know the story.

FAQ