"Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: June 14, 1942 – August 1, 1944"- Three copies, first editions of the book in Dutch (the first edition ever published), Hebrew, and Yiddish.
1. Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven 14 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 [The Annex: Diary Notes 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944]. Amsterdam: Contact, June 1947. First Dutch edition. Only 1,500 copies printed. The Dutch edition was the first edition of Diary of a Young Girl ever published, preceding the first English language edition by five years.
XI, 253 pages, 19cm. Very Good condition. Clean leaves (light sporadic spotting). Hard cover. Boards lightly bowed, with light stains. No dust jacket.
2. Yomana Shel Ne'ara [Diary of a Young Girl]. Translated from Dutch by S. [Shmuel] Schnitzer. Jerusalem: Karni, 1953. First Hebrew edition.
220 pages, 19.5cm. Very Good condition. A few minor stains and tears. Hard cover, with the original paper dust jacket in Very Good condition (short, closed tears and slight chipping). Small bookshop label to the inner front cover.
3. Tagbuch Fon a Meidel [Diary of a Young Girl]. Translated by Yehoshua HaShiloni (Schleien). Tel Aviv: Menorah, 1958. First Yiddish edition.
322, [1] pages, 20.5cm. Good condition. Light spotting, mostly on the front and back pages. A few worming to the back cover and some of the back pages. Slight faults to the cover. No dust jacket as issued.
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (1929-1945) was born in Frankfurt and moved with her family to the Netherlands in 1933, after the Nazis came to power. As persecutions of the Dutch Jewish population increased, in July 1942, the Frank family went into hiding in a sealed-off room on the upper floor of the annex at the back of the building in which Otto Frank, Anne's father, worked. The entrance to their secret hiding place was behind a bookcase, which hid a concealed door. On August 4 1944, the hiding place was uncovered and the Frank family was transferred to the Westerbork transit camp, from where they were transported one month later to the Auschwitz concentration camp. On October 28 1944, Anne and her sister Margot were moved to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they both died of typhus.
During the two years she spent in hiding, Anne Frank kept a diary in which she documented her life and the lives of the people who shared the hiding place with her. The manuscript of the diary was found after the family’s arrest by the owners of the rooms in which the family had hidden. After the war they gave it to Anne’s father, the only family member who had survived the Holocaust.
First published in 1947, the diary quickly received widespread critical and popular attention, touching readers all over the world. It was translated into more than 70 languages, published in over 60 countries and adapted to the theater (winning the 1955 Pulitzer Prize) and screen (for which Shelley Winters won the 1959 Academy Award, whereupon she donated her Oscar to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam). In the 1950s the book became a best-seller in Israel. It was added to the high-school reading curriculum and the publishers of the Davar daily newspaper gifted the book to its subscribers.
Since it was first published, The Diary of Anne Frank has maintained its position as an international best-seller and a classic of 20th century literature. It is the biggest best-seller and most widely translated book ever published in the Dutch language, the most popular personal diary of all time and one of the 10 best-selling works of fiction ever. Almost 70 years on, the diary continues to hold its place at the top of many literary lists. It is consistently voted one of the 10 most important books published in the 20th century, the most famous diary of modern times, the most famous work by a teenager, the most famous work on the Holocaust and the most famous 20th century work by a Jew.