Dirty Jokes Revealed and Otto’s Visit to Paris
The Anne Frank House announced that two pages of text covered up with gummed paper in the first diary of Anne Frank had been made legible thanks to new technology.
The "new technology" seems to consist of shining a bright light on the back of the page but the Anne Frank House has a way of trying to generate excitement.
The Guardian newspaper translated the text as,
"All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together. In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there.”
The Anne Frank House wrote,
“From these jokes Anne moves on to the subject of sex education, which she pretends she has to give to someone else. In this way she can show what she knows about it. At the end she explicitly names her father, who had been in Paris and saw houses with prostitutes.
"Been there" or "saw"… AFH uses a sanitized translation that avoids the possibility that Otto could have been to a house of prostitution.
The pages themselves were covered in both Anne's childish printing and an adult's cursive writing. A copy can be seen here
Whether or not a 13-year-old girl would know if her father had visited a whorehouse, it is a very open question which the AFH avoids despite the fact that there are many indications that Otto Frank was a philanderer. Besides being in a loveless marriage, Otto seems to have had an affair with the wife of at least one employee. While the AFH has constantly dangled the question of who "betrayed Anne Frank" as a publicity gimmick, it has ignored a prime suspect. The affair between Otto and Jetje Jansen, wife of employee Joseph "Job" Jansen, has been hushed up at Anne Frank House.
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