A Racy Rewrite With Steamy Romance

By Devra Ferst June 24, 2010

Anne Frank’s diary has a few ellipses where parts were left out. Her story, one of the most famous in the world, is not completely known. What was so revealing that Otto Frank, her father, who published her diary in 1947, wouldn’t let the world see?

It’s believed that Otto removed passages about Anne’s love affair with Peter van Pels, the 16-year-old son of Auguste and Hermann van Pels, who shared the Franks’ hiding annex in Amsterdam. Peter and Anne, who detest each other at the beginning of Anne’s diary in 1942, later develop feelings for each other, at which Anne hints.

Now, British author and child psychotherapist Sharon Dogar, in her book “Annexed,” which is coming out in October, reimagines what might have happened between Anne and Peter, including some steamy romance scenes.

The book was originally written with a sex scene, but it was cut during editing. “Sharon reread and reread Anne’s diaries and is in no doubt that they were in love,” Charlie Sheppard, editorial director of Andersen Press, which is releasing the book in England, told the London Times.

In Dogar’s interpretation, the story is told from Peter’s perspective in his fictitious diary, which follows him from the day he enters the annex through his time in hiding with Anne. Unlike Anne’s diary, which ends when the families are discovered and deported to concentration camps in August 1944, Dogar’s book continues after the evacuation and follows Peter to Auschwitz and then to Mauthausen, where he dies only shortly before the end of the war, in May 1945.

The not-yet-released book has already drawn criticism. Buddy Elias, Anne’s first cousin who chairs a charity in her memory, has spoken out against the book’s premise. Elias, in a mid-June interview with the Times, said, “Anne was not the child she is in this book.” He added, “I also do not think that their terrible destiny should be used to invent some fictitious story.”

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