The Diary of Anne Frank runs through December 4 at OnStage Playhouse. Here's some background for this fine production:

On June 12, 1942, Otto Frank gave his daughter, Annelies Marie, an autograph album for her 13th birthday. She decided to make the red-orange, checkered, clothbound book a diary. She welcomed her "new friend" and hoped she'd "be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone."

"It's an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary," she wrote later, "because it seems to me that neither I - nor for that matter anyone else - will be interested in the unbosomings of a 13-year-old schoolgirl. Still, what does it matter? I want to write, but more than that I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart."

On July 6, 1942, the Frank family went into hiding in a secret annex above her father's office building at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam. Blackout paper covered the windows. They could only move at night.

In September Anne began addressing characters in Cissy van Marxvelt's novels, one named Kitty, in particular. By the time the first diary ran out of pages, Kitty had become Anne's exclusive friend. The entries, now in accounting books and stray papers, become letters to Kitty.

Anne had always wanted to be a writer. On April 5, 1944, she sealed that commitment: "I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work. I know myself what is and what is not well written...I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift...of expressing all that is in me."

Some have suggested that the confinement prompted Anne to single out a personal friend to tell all to. One of the entries exclaims: "I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.

Miep Dies, one of the family's lifelines during their 25 months of confinement, speculates: "It was as though the terrible events in the outside world were speeding up this little girl's development, as though Anne were suddenly in a hurry to know and experience everything. On the outside, Anne was delicate [and] vivacious, but on the inside, a part of her was suddenly much older."

During a visit to the annex, Miep accidentally intruded on Anne while she was writing. Anne was too engrossed to notice her, at first. Then, says Miep, she "looked up surprised and saw me standing there." Anne had a look of "dark concentration." The mood disturbed Miep. "I knew that more and more her diary had become her life...she was so upset by my interruption. It was another person."

On May 20, 1944, Gerrit Bolkestein, Minister for Education, spoke from London on Radio Orange, voice of the Dutch government in exile. He asked the Dutch to save documents, letters and diaries, for a day-to-day record of life under German occupation.

The broadcast changed Anne Frank's approach. She would become a public voice, would revise her entries into a first-person account of what it was like to face certain death every day and somehow still believe in the essential goodness of humanity.

Studies of this text show she revised up to 11 pages a day, 324 in all. She named them for the hiding place: Het Achterhuis ("behind the house" or "the annex").

On August 4, 1944, the Green police raided the annex.

Only Otto Frank survived the Holocaust.

But two of the three diaries, and the final revised version, survived. Just after the family was arrested, Miep Gies and Bep Voskujil went up to the annex. On the floor, "amid chaos of papers and books," Miep saw the red-orange diary, along with the accounting books and loose pages strewn about.

Miep snuck the diaries out. Later she returned and gathered up more papers written in Anne's "scrawling handwriting."

Otto Frank read the dairy ("who'd have imagined how vivid her imagination [was]!") and showed it to friends. One of them, Dr. Jan Romein, was a Dutch historian. He promoted the diary: This "de profundis" - from the depths - "stammered out in a child's voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence of Nuremberg put together."

Otto had an edited version published. He cut out entries about Anne's growing sexuality and anger toward her mother.

It didn't sell. It was written in Dutch, and many speculate that the Dutch people wanted no reminder of the havoc they had lived through.

In 1950, the diary was translated into French and German, and later into English. "Critical" and "Definitive" editions followed, the latter restoring 30 percent more material.

The diary has since been translated into over 60 languages. Now all the world can read the girl "who wrote without reserve."

Miep Dies died in January, 2010. She was 100 years old.