School district pulls Anne Frank’s diary over ‘vagina’ passage

By Daniel Tencer
Thursday, January 28th, 2010 -- 11:08 pm
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annefrank School district pulls Anne Franks diary over vagina passageAnne Frank's adolescent curiosity about sexuality is too much for a Virginia school district that has pulled the complete version of the young Jewish girl's diary off its curriculum and off its shelves over a parent's complaint about sexually explicit passages.

Culpeper County Public Schools has pulled Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition off the shelves because parents complained "over the sexual nature of the vagina passage in the definitive edition," reports the Culpeper, Virginia, Star-Exponent.

The complaint has to do specifically with an expanded version of the diary published in 1995. Frank's father, Otto, had excised large parts of his daughter's diary prior to publication in the late 1940s. Anne died of typhus while being held at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March, 1945. Her diary has made her arguably the most famous Holocaust victim.

According to Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post, the offending passage is a description of female genitalia:

There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can't imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!

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The decision to pull the book appears to have been made quickly, last November, on the basis of one complaint from a parent. The Star-Exponent reports:

Citing a parent’s concern over the sexual nature of the vagina passage in the definitive edition, Allen said school officials immediately chose to pull this version and use an alternative copy.

“What we have asked is that this particular edition will not be taught,” Allen said from his office Wednesday morning.

“I’m happy when parents get involved with these things because it lets me know that they are really looking and have their kids’ best interest (in mind). And that’s where good parenting and good teaching comes in.”

Amazon.com lists Anne Frank's diary as one of the most banned children's books, "for being too depressing for students." The diary chronicles some two years of Frank's life as she hid out with her family in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during World War II. It is considered one of the most famous and vivid accounts of the war.

But the American Library Association says it has documented only six challenges to the book since 1990.

(Editor's Note: Article originally wrongly stated that Frank died in Auschwitz.)

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Story comments are below...

  • shakresha
    this is embarassing to read. we hear more vulgar language out of these parent's mouths then we do out of Anne Frank's diary. Are you gonna ban health books too because they show images of Vagina's or Penis's? Or because they are talked about? Anne would most likely be like any other student. Sexually Curious & innocent. This is in my own words, idiotic!
  • wow....
    can you imagine how Otto Frank felt when he read all of his daughters TMI parts? man..talk about awkward
  • thegwd
    They do know that kids sleep in class when forced to read literature right?
  • captainderp
    Sounds like someone had a tight box.
  • charity
    this is a life story of a young girl who was hidden from the world!!!! and schools say that they pulled her book because it talked about genitialia when now a days the school system teaches our younger generation about sex in a classroom whats the difference in the two???????????
  • Bob46
    So are the Bible, Shakespeare and Chaucer also to be banned? What a shame that a simple, childlike perception should be expunged when all that it does is to demonstrate Anne's naiivety.
  • Bob46
    So is the Bible, Shakespeare and Chaucer also to be banned? What a shame that a simple, childlike perception should be expunged when all that it does is to demonstrate Anne's naiivety.
  • tiger_woods_wife
    i read this in 6th grade and it was on tape!! i got detintion from laughing my ass off
  • Nastya
    That sounds more like biology than anything sexually explicit... She's talking about reproduction, not hot lovins'.

    P.S.: Where does it say that the complainer was Christian. People will jump at any darn chance to bash religion.
  • Perhaps we’re making much ado about nothing. Banning “The Diary of Anne Frank” from the school curriculum is not fair at all. Anne is describing what every child goes through – exploring his/her sexuality. It is normal. Imagine Anne’s situation. Think of her age. She is on the threshold of becoming a woman. Think of the entire experience of reading the book and getting to know the daily terrors and fears that people faced during World War II. Surely this will overshadow a couple of paragraphs that some call `objectionable’. Shmoop.com was a great help in adding perspective to this book. It’s given me a closer glimpse of what is was like for a young Jewish girl to live during the time of the Nazis.
  • What a rude little girl for writing about her front bottom. I want to know who told her she had one! God told me that the main reason we fought in WW2 was to stem the foul tide of disgusting European Godless depravity and rudery.
  • FLIXSTIX
    Don't blame Christians for this one...blame the narrow minded prudes. Just because someone calls themselves a Christian doesn't make it so. YAY FOR VAGINAS.
  • Useful Information.
  • hall_monitor
    This story made http://detentionslip.org ! Check it out for all th crazy headlines from our schools.
  • frank
    religion is to guide your life not run it.
  • Ridiculous.

    While I'm writing, "Amazon.com lists Anne Frank’s diary as one of the most banned children’s books ... [b]ut the American Library Association says it has documented only six challenges to the book since 1990," what a juxtaposition.
  • Richard Rowland
    I contacted the superintendent of Schools of Culpper Co Va. Bobbi Johnson, and she reassured me that this had been reported incorrectly. She stated that all students can read this book and the story really is that one student requested an alternative assignment and was given one.
  • splashy79
    Ah, but THATS all from the point o
  • icenine
    I guess they'll just have to start putting out two versions of novels and textbooks. One for adults and one for right-wing "christians". That way the offending word can be changed from vagina to "boo-boo" or something. Or the whole vagina passage could be redacted along with other passages too human-like and the book could look like a Bush administration FOI document with blocks of blacked out paragraphs.
  • Yayas
    Virginia ia all about taking away people's rights. That's why they say Virginia is for Lovers (of bondage).
  • overdoneputaforkinit
    I now understand how the Taliban could take our freedoms away. If they came to this country and complained to school administrators that their children had too much freedom, the school would take away freedom for all children in the whole district. The children would grow up like the Taliban wanted them to.
  • ITDog09
    I agree, we must do whatever is necessary to protect the innocent minds of the very few young boys who were never bathed with one of their sisters or ever saw their mommy naked, or Heaven forbid ever openned one of daddy's magazines that he keeps in the bottom draw, or ever went to a friend's house who had a naughty older sister, or overheard his auntie and mommy talking about you know... or used the internet, EVER. Yes, putting a bubble around these precious young minds, for at least a few more years, or days, or whatever, is far more important than engaging the VAST MAJORITY of students in what we all know as reality.
  • martin
    to hell with anne frank.
  • shakresha
    wow, your cool
    how about to hell with you :)
  • fuckurunnin
    the whole thing is a fraud, the complete fraudulent industry.

    shame ontop of shame have a great day with that
  • fuckurunnin
    total fruad it is the whole industry
  • B Eaton
    Judges know that a strict banning of literature would ban the Holy Bible from libraries and pull it from the shelves of book stores. The obscenities and obsurdities of the Bible are often ignored by the same people who monitor what their children watch and read and who throw a fit about any other material that contains the same obscenities
  • I'll bet anything this same puritan tyrant doesn't see anything wrong with the 'Song of Solomon' even though that's waaaaay more pornographic than this.
  • Charles Farley
    Perhaps a fitting end to the diary of Anne Frank would be to take all copies of the book, place them in a big pile in some open public space, perhaps in front of a distinguished university, and set them ablaze. This will send a message to the other members of the Christaliban that degenerate literature will not be tolerated and will be purged in order to make society pure once again.

    Interestingly enough, the article in “The Raw Story” is wrong. Anne Frank was not “killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp in March, 1945” Auschwitz is in Poland. Anne Frank died of Typhoid Fever in March 1945 in Bergen Belsen—about three weeks before the camp was liberated on April 15, 1945. Bergen Belsen in in Germany (near Hannover) and was not a Death camp as we imagine Auschwitz and Treblinka. There were no functioning gas chambers at any camp within the borders of Germany proper. This does not make the experience there any less horrible or Anne’s death any less tragic. Semantically, Anne was not “killed” as this requires active participation in the act. Anne “died” (from disease) which is fairly passive. One could make the argument, however, that mistreatment and neglect constitute a de facto killing. These facts may seem trivial, but when someone like this gets it wrong, it only adds fuel to the holocaust denial argument
  • DFW
    The diary of Anne Frank, for over half a century, has been hailed as a marvel of the triumph of the human spirit over forces of evil that a fifteen year old girl could scarcely comprehend. To suddenly, arbitrarily, find some passage and make it a cause célébre ("we got trouble right here in River City") for petty local political (morality has nothing to do with this) purposes is so perverted, it's as disgusting as it is transparent. Virginia, as most other parts of the country, has issues with the state budget, unemployment, depleted fishing grounds and a receding coastline (for coastal states), and some school board member who wants to make a name for himself can't find a better cause to take up than a diary of a Jewish Dutch girl written in the 1940s?

    Talk about a poverty of spirit. Anne Frank's diary will continue to be a classic long after this embarrassment to Virginia has been forgotten.
  • breaking!! virginia has no vaginae!
  • Sam
    So of course there would be 149 (at this time) comments on this thread where commenting is allowed. But on these articles (two examples):

    1. US in $6B arms sale to Taiwan
    2. Blair: No regrets for removing Saddam

    ------------NO COMMENTING ALLOWED ON THOSE ARTICLES.---------------

    Imagine that. RS is using the old-styled pages for those articles. It's deliberate. Raw is doing their best to protect their Bush-accomplice Dems from those who pay attention because the mid-terms are coming up in November. 'Gotta keep Dems in, Gotta keep Dems in." War criminals Tony Blair and George Bush walk freely. But get back to the vagina discussion, which is far more important than war criminals and protecting the US Constitution (what remains of it).
  • 1a. america is the world's arms manufacturer and salesman - the only mfn jobs in usa of significance - econ growth 5.5% yahoo!
    b. america supports a 'one china' policy - this deal is a backdoor sale to china so they continue to buy our junk paper ...

    2a. this iraq inquiry is kabuki cover for the american criminals that will never come to inquiry and usages the sensibilities of europeans seeking to cleanse themselves for being america's whores ... watch the outcome ...
    b. launching a war against an 'evil tryrant' terrorizes and murders the population that were being murdered and terrorized by that tyrant.
  • Ursula
    Dear Daniel, Can you please confirm that Anne Frank was killed at Auschwitz concentration camp.
    I thought she died at Bergen Belsen, a few weeks before it was liberated.
  • DG
    Anne Frank died at Bergen Belsen--not Auschwitz.
  • Atashi
    Wow. Just... wow. People are so stupid, lemme tell you... what, do they not teach sex ed in that school, either? 'cause... I imagine that mother would have a hissy fit over that...
  • canadianskeptic
    That is retarded
  • keystone999
    This is why America has the world's 2nd highest number of babies born to unwed teens - Mexico has the dubious honor of 1st place. Does ignorance and prudishness help educate your children? Perhaps if more of them knew how their bodies worked, they would be less likely to learn about sex from bathroom walls or poorly informed peer groups.
  • Hooker
    When I was a kid Stus Lonigan was a "hot" book. Now, it's The Diary of Anne Frank. What's next Alice in Wonderland - that's where these people are living.
  • Hooker
    I believe that Shakespeare should be banned from all school districts. It is filled with violence, killing, can be deeply depressing, and if you look carefully enough, you can even come across the old Angle-Saxon epithet "fuck."

    Keep our children pure - and stupid!
  • carol h.
    What lunacy. In this day and age with kids reading and watching everything, including email pictures of one another naked, and this one passage from a book is excised? Give me a break!! The kids not only know what a vagina is, they probably know more ways to use it then their parents. It is a young girls curiosity about a very basic thing. With no one to ask.

    Good grief, this was a smart, vulnerable girl living under conditions most of us cannot imagine. She experienced and saw things most of the selfish in the world could not even read about? This girl was not a plaster saint. She had all the emotions and depth and the innocence that circumstances allowed her. To take out a few lines that highlighted the human curiosity of any adolescent is obscene. And this parent missed the reach and purpose of the whole book, all they stuck on was the one line. She missed the rest. And she missed the reality of this girl's existence. God help us, if we all had this stupid, grasp of humanity. This reference to sex is all they saw.
  • Sadly, it's just more typical intellectual and social cowardice on the part of the 'average' American. Perhaps we will go the way of the dinosaur after all. :(
  • Satan
    I hope they don't allow a bible to discgrace their school library either. Especially that part about the horse semen.

    EZ23:20
    "For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses. "

    In fact, the whole passage goes on like the rantings of some crazed serial murderer, what could be more American than that?
  • jdouglas
    Anybody ever consider the possibility that if Anne Frank were alive today she's be absolutely horrified by the fact that millions of people have been reading her private diary?
  • Hooker
    Right. She's living with Adolph Hitler and talking about the old days.
  • JDouglas
    I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that, but you sound like a sick f**k.
  • naschkatze
    Thank you, Raw Story, for your, well, frank telling of the passage. I have read the later edition and when I described what the "big deal" was about on another site which chose to take a more titillating approach, I was Mrs. Grundy-ed. I doubt that there is any one of us including the parents who requested the book be removed from the shelves who did not as a boy or girl make the same self examination.
  • Maceck
    "We're from America, we're from America; we turn literature into litter." - Marilyn Manson
  • guest
    anyone care to show me in the article where it says the woman who complained was a christian?

    or are we just being close-minded and stereotypical?
  • Hooker
    Wanna bet?
  • John Dillinger
    Granted the woman is a fool - but its not like they removed the book from the curriculum. They just went to the prior version, the one Anne Frank's father released in the late 1940's.
  • disappointedvoter
    Has it occurred to anyone that other than christian religious freaks, the only group that would ban The Diary of Anne Frank is the Nazis?
  • disappointedvoter
    The last I heard, ORAL SEX was a FELONY SEX CRIME AGAINST THE STATE in Virginia. Even if you're married.

    Anyone know whether this is still true?

    God damn these retarded Southern fuckwads.
  • jimbojamesiv
    What is wrong with people that say they love their children and all they do is lie to them. For instance, how old was Anne Frank when she wrote the offending passage, my guess is no older than 12, so, wake up, America 12 year old girls are looking at it and asking questions. What are Americans so afraid of? What is wrong with Americans that they so shamefully lie to their children, to themselves, and to everyone else in between.
  • Crock
    Culpepper County, isn't that the town that has that group called "The Finders" that abducted kids back in the 80s? Bunch of weirdos. Did Culpepper ever shut that cult down? I never heard that they did.

    http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.c...
  • maxpower
    First off the little a-hole should be home-schooled so she can grow up to be a big a-hole like her parents. Secondly GOP conservative a-holes trying to re-write history by deleting the book from the library. Thirdly no one has any balls in Virginia to stand up to these f*ck wads. Sadly a lot of our forefathers were from Vagina, I mean Virginia.
  • Miserys_Fence
    Teenaged girls with vaginas! Dear Lord, what is this world coming to? Next thing you know, teenaged boys will have penises. It's the end times, I tell ya!!
  • Miserys_Fence
    Teenaged girls having vaginas! Dear Lord, what is this world coming to??

    Next thing you know, teenaged boys will be having penises...
  • Hooker
    What are you wishing on us? Aren't we screwed up enough already?
  • Sofia A.
    It's pretty amusing... Anne Frank's diary is probably THE most important 1st hand account of the Holocaust, & some dumb-ass, probably sex-deprived bitch in, of all places, Virginia WOULD go and throw a hissy fit about something that every single human goes through. What, does she just not look down there when she goes to the bathroom in fear that Satan himself will fume out of there and enter her soul? Instead of banning the book, the school district should have handed her a dildo & been done with it.
  • the higher-ups
    This is just sad... a little girls curiosity about her own body is banned all because one up-tight mom doesn't want to face reality? Its the same narrow-minded thinking that is behind the anti-abortion/no sex-ed crusade. And using child protection as a means to censorship is in itself offensive.
  • Hooker
    Exactly. If that uptight woman had had a little more curiosity about her own body, maybe she wouldn't have grown up to be such a "c..." well, let's say, a "vagina."
  • iowaheretic
    Why do you think it was the mom that was offended and uptight? I assumed that it was the dad. Just listen to some of those Ultra-Right wingers,and you'll know what I'm talking about.
  • postroad
    Generally, if a parent or parents object over a choice considered ok, the teacher or school tells the parent the child may read an alternative text and not the one questioned.

    It is nice to know that by removing this passage, a child will not know vaginas exist, given femals by an Intelligent Designer (if not Evolution).
  • chabuka
    WTF...what the hell are the people in Virginia, South Carolina, etc., drinking....? I thought that all the old Puritans, the witch hunters and the other holier than thou crazies had all died out...or where killed off by the other settlers...must have been hiding and breeding in some undisclosed underground location all these years
  • davidrvelasquez
    Does that mean that it comes in a plain brown wrapper now?
  • Hooker
    You're a funny guy, David. Thanks.
  • Phil E. Drifter
    I NEVER EVEN KNEW ANNE FRANK HAD A VAGINA!!!

    This is because this is what religions preach; sex is bad, don't do it! Except it's human nature. Even if you tell a kid NOTHING about sex, they will eventually learn to masturbate anyway, they'll use Sears catalogs or Victoria Secrets catologs and they'll be ashamed of themselves but they'll still do it because it's natural.
  • theonlyseven
    I for one have particularly fond memories of one page in the 1978 Sears Wish Book.
  • theonlyseven
    This is totally insane. I cant believe how selfish some parents are. Basically they are saying their needs and how they wish to raise their children trump the needs and wishes of all the other children and parents in the school. Look, if you don’t want your child learning certain things, talk to the teacher or pull them out of public school and home school them or send them to some Jebus camp school. Those are your rights. What you do not have a right to do is impose your regressive, puritanical views on other families.
  • Phil E. Drifter
    yet they near-constantly advertise penis pills on tv all the time...
  • Robert
    And she died at Bergen-Belsen, not Auschwitz.
  • Robert
    Anne Frank died of typhus in the concentration camp. She was not killed. You can argue that her imprisonment led to her death, but she was not shot or gassed.
  • this is not a case of "christians throwing a fit" as some people have said. i am a christian, and this happens to be my favorite book. this is a case of a school district being stupid...pulling a book because of ONE parent's complaint. that's the stupidest thing i ever heard! god forbid we allow our kids to read an honest, beautifully-written, historically accurate, literary CLASSIC. you can't censor a kid's thoughts. they do think about these things. personally, i would rather my future children read this than the overly-hyped up, i-can't-live-without-you twilight crap. what's the school going to do if a kid buys the definitive edition and brings it in to read?1
  • theonlyseven
    I do agree with much of what you have said, but you do need to admit that the parent behind this in all likelihood believes they are a christian. I don’t think a Jewish parent would object, and if it was a muslim parent that factoid that would most certainly reported and exploited. Plus it’s Virginia, home of Liberty and Regent University, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Please keep in mind, I said this parent thinks they are a christian, but in fact they are not a christian at all. They sound more like the mother in Carrie, freaking out over “dirty pillows.”
  • Coralie
    People are so.... archaic. How is that passage to graphic? Since when is it disgusting or wrong to have children wonder about their sexuality?
  • denhickey
    As usual... violence is totally okay... but even mentioning anything to do with sex... thats horrible!

    Ridiculous
  • robertfromphila
    We must protect the children! I know what is moral an what is not, and mentioning or describing Genitalia of any kind, or what they are used for, or how, or anything with the dreaded word"s*ex". or mast*urb*ation, or "s*exu*al *int*erco*urs*e", or "P*EN*IS, V*AGIN*A" or "%*#$$*@", is not good for the children. Why I can't even spell the damnable things. Why should anyone risk sending their beloved children to Satan? Don't you read the BIBLE? It says very clearly: THOU SHALT NOT MENTION, ENJOY, PARTICIPATE IN (With the exception of procreation in a church sanctioned matrimonial relationship), OR CONDONE AID OR ABET, any action which may cause animal pleasure in these vessels created in the image of GOD. I will confront these abominations as long as I live and even after I am dead and residing in Heaven with multitudes of VIRGINS who contemplate and masturbate to the existence of GOD. SO THERE!
  • john
    From now on the Bible will find its proper place in my abode. Right by the commode.
  • john
    From now on the Bible will find its proper place in my abode. Right by the commode.
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