Such an amazing story from the NY Times, with lots of images of the diaries!

Anne Frank listened in an Amsterdam attic on March 28, 1944, as the voice of the Dutch minister of education came crackling over the radio from London. “Preserve your diaries and letters,” he said.

Frank was not the only one listening.

Thousands of Dutch people had been recording their experiences under German occupation since the Nazi invasion four years earlier. So the words of the minister, part of a government trying to operate from exile in England, resonated.

“Only if we succeed in bringing this simple, daily material together in overwhelming quantity, only then will the scene of this struggle for freedom be painted in full depth and shine,” the minister, Gerrit Bolkestein, said.

Frank responded by setting aside “Kitty,” the diary she had created as a personal refuge, and beginning a revised version called “The Secret Annex,” which she hoped to publish.

Other diarists persevered too, and after the country was liberated in May 1945, they showed up at the National Office for the History of the Netherlands in Wartime, with their notebooks and letters in hand. More than 2,000 diaries were collected, each a story of pain and loss, fear and hunger and, yes, moments of levity amid the misery.

See more at New York Times: The Lost Diaries of War