Letters Show Different Side of Anne Frank

Any father of a headstrong 14-year-old girl might recognize the words:"Just leave me alone, if you don't want me to stop trusting you for good." The furious letter from Anne Frank to her father, Otto, was written nearly two years after the Frank family locked itself into a concealed apartment to escape deportation by the Nazi army occupying the Netherlands.

Never displayed before, the two-page letter in Anne's careful script is part of an exhibition of letters, postcards and family notes -- with ink stains, water spots and ragged edges -- which opens Wednesday at the Amsterdam Historical Museum.

In the diary she wrote in hiding -- which her father recovered after the war -- Anne quotes from the angry letter she wrote in May 1944 and says her father told her he would burn it. He never did, and it went to the National Institute for War Documentation after he died in 1980.

"If only you knew how much I used to cry at night, how despondent and unhappy I was, how lonely I felt, you'd understand my wanting to go upstairs," she wrote after Otto forbade her to spend time alone in the attic with the young boy with whom the Franks shared the hiding place.

"I want to go my own way, to follow the path that seems right to me. Don't think of me as a 14-year-old, since all these troubles have made me older. I won't regret my actions. I'll behave the way I think I should."

"That letter hit me the most," said curator Wouter van der Sluis."It's not just a letter. It's a declaration of independence toward her father."