After some months at the Secret Annex, Anne begins to become interested in Peter van Daan. Peter, who is a bit older than Anne, is the son of the other family living in the Secret Annex.
After time spent with Peter, Anne gushes to her diary: 'We talked about every imaginable thing, about trust, feelings and ourselves. Oh, Kitty, he was just as I thought he would be.'
Anne hopes the relationship will last. 'Whenever he looks at me with those eyes, with that smile and that wink, it's as if a light goes on inside me. I hope things will stay like this and that we'll have many, many more happy hours together.'
Anne and Peter have several rather frank conversations about sexuality. Anne writes, 'I was with Peter yesterday and, somehow, I honestly don't know how, we wound up talking about sex. I'd made up my mind a long time ago to ask him a few things. He knows everything; when I said that Margot and I weren't very well informed, he was amazed.'
Peter explains to Anne how contraceptives work, and later he displays the cat's sex organs for her to examine. 'This is the male sexual organ, these are a few stray hairs, and that's his backside,' Peter says. 'If any other boy had pointed out the 'male sexual organ' to me, I would never have given him a second glance,' Anne says. 'But Peter went on talking in a normal voice about what is otherwise a very awkward subject. Nor did he have any ulterior motives. By the time he'd finished, I felt so much at ease that I started acting normally too.'
