Anne Frank's diaries return home

All the original diaries and writings of Anne Frank will be on display in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam from now on, The Dutch Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences and the ministry of education announced on Thursday.

The material will return to the place where it was written, Anne Frank's safehouse on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.

The deal in which the NIOD permanently loans the writings to the museum comes one day before Anne Frank's 80th birthday. Education minister Ronald Plasterk told reporters: "Anne Frank is world famous, and it is wonderful that the Dutch nation and visitors from all over the globe can now see the original versions of her complete work. I hope and expect that this will further increase interest in her history and in our history. The Netherlands underestimates the international reputation of Anne Frank. In South Korea, she is better known than the Netherlands itself."

Anne Frank was born in Germany on June 12, 1929, but moved to Amsterdam in 1934. She and her family went into hiding in 1942. Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration at age 15, not long before the end of World War II in Europe. Her father, the only one in the Frank family who survived the war, left the diaries to the NIOD, which has kept them since his death in 1980. They have been on display at the museum before, but now that location will become permanent. "In this way, justice is done to the great significance of Anne's writings as part of the Dutch cultural heritage," the official statement reads.

Not only the famous red-checked diary will feature in the new exhibition to open in November, but also the second and third diaries, the Tales from the Secret Annexe (Verhaaltjesboek) and the Favorite Quotes Notebook (Mooie Zinnenboek). Forty of the several hundred, brittle, loose sheets of paper on which Anne rewrote her diary will alternately be on display.

Also on Thursday, the memorial centre of the transit camp Westerbork announced that it will re-instate the shed in which Anne and her sister Margot worked after they were captured in 1944 and before they were deported to Bergen-Belsen. The sisters had to remove carbon from old batteries in a shed that was sold and relocated after the war. After a dispute between the owner and the municipality was solved, the shack will now be taken apart and rebuilt in its original location.