SOURCE: "The Whole Anne Frank," in The New York Times Book Review, March 5, 1995, pp. 1, 21.

[Hampl is an American educator, poet, and memoirist. In the following review, she comments on the new edition of Anne Frank's Diary and discusses the book's publication history.]

On Tuesday, March 28, 1944, Gerrit Bolkestein, Education Minister of the Dutch Government in exile, delivered a radio message from London urging his war-weary countrymen to collect "vast quantities of simple, everyday material" as part of the historical record of the Nazi occupation.

"History cannot be written on the basis of official decisions and documents alone," he said. "If our descendants are to understand fully what we as a nation have had to endure and overcome during these years, then what we really need are ordinary documents—a diary, letters."

In her diary the next day, Anne Frank mentions this broadcast, which she and her family heard on...