Anne Frank's writings to go on permanent display

The diaries and all other writings of teenage Holocaust victim Anne Frank will go on permanent display at the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam.

In an announcement to commemorate what would have been Frank's 80th birthday on Friday, museum officials said the writings were donated to the museum on Thursday by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation.

The museum plans to have the writings on display in an upgraded exhibit hall by Nov. 1.

Until now, Frank's posthumously published diaries and other works have been kept in an archive at the institute. Some have previously been displayed at the museum, a former warehouse in which the Franks and anotherfamily hid for two years.

At a news conference at the museum on Thursday, Dutch Education Minister Ronald Plasterk said it is important for the historical record that the writings be on permanent display "on the spot where they were written."

The Franks' hiding place was betrayed, and they were arrested by the Nazis in August 1944. Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp only weeks before it was liberated in the spring of 1945. She was 15 years old.

Her diary was recovered by Miep Gies, a Dutch woman who helped the Franks while they were in hiding. Frank's father, Otto Frank, who survived the war, published the diaries in 1947 as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

They provide details of the Jewish family's life in hiding, and a glimpse into the mind and emotions of a young girl during Nazi persecution. Translated into more than 70 languages, the book has made Frank an enduring symbol of all the Jews who were killed during the Holocaust.

Several diaries

"Everyone knows the diary of Anne Frank," Plasterk said, "but actually there wasn't one diary, she wrote several of them."

The red-and-white autograph book in which Frank wrote her first diary entries in June 1942, before the family went into hiding in July, is nowon display at the museum.

She also used two school exercise books as diaries when the autograph book was full.

There is also a small ledger from her father's office she filled with quotes she liked from books she had read and called her "Beautiful Sentence Booklet." In addition, she wrote short stories in an account book.

There are also 360 brittle, loose sheets of paper that she used to rewrite the diaries when it became apparent that Germany was losing the war and she thought her diaries might one day be published. Forty of these will be on permanent alternating display, the museum said in a statement.

"There's a lot in my diaries that speaks, but whether I have real talent remains to be seen," she wrote on April 4, 1944.