Editor Judith Jones (Photo by Christopher Hirsheimer)

After more than 50 years in publishing, Judith Jones has earned a reputation as a master of cookbooks. Among the many works that fill her dossier as an editor is Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1960), which gave post-war Americans something different from meatloaf and tuna casserole.

Jones confesses that she has always loved cooking, so it’s no surprise that much of her legacy as senior editor and vice president at Knopf fills millions of kitchen shelves around the world. But all of these cookbooks merely overshadow what is arguably her most important contribution to the world of literature–one that she made at the beginning of her career.

“It was around 1950, and I was in Paris working for Doubleday as an assistant to Frank Price, who the company had sent over to scout titles,” Jones recalls. “Our office was a rather beautiful apartment on the rue de la Faisanderie, and one afternoon, Frank went off to a lunch appointment and left me with a pile of manuscripts for rejection. He wanted me to write the letters and send them off.”

So, Jones began typing the letters for one manuscript after another, when the pile revealed something that caught her eye. A 12-year-old girl with thick, black hair, chestnut eyes, and a bright smile gazed back at her from the cover of a French translation entitled The Diary of a Young Girl.

Even in black and white, the girl’s face radiated a warmth and innocence that Jones could not ignore. Instead of reaching for another sheet of Doubleday letterhead, on which she had written the other rejections, she opened the book and began reading.

Jones soon found herself immersed in the world of Annelies Marie Frank, a Jewish girl living with her mother, father, and sister in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. For her 13th birthday, Anne’s father, Otto, gave her a plaid-covered journal in which she began her diary.

From June 12, 1942, to August 1, 1944, Anne provided a day-by-day portrait of life under the Nazi regime. At first, her entries were typical of most girls her age, but their subjects grew increasingly sinister as she related details of the anti-Jewish decrees that deprived people like Anne and her family of the most basic pleasures in life.

She wrote: “Jews were forbidden to ride in cars, even their own; Jews were required to do their shopping between 3 and 5 p.m.; Jews were required to frequent only Jewish-owned barbershops and beauty parlors; Jews were forbidden to be out on the streets between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m.; Jews were forbidden to attend theaters, movies, or any other forms of entertainment; Jews were forbidden to use swimming pools, tennis courts, hockey fields, or any other athletic fields; . . . Jews were forbidden to sit in their gardens or those of their friends after 8 p.m.; Jews were forbidden to visit Christians in their homes; Jews were required to attend Jewish schools . . .”

Such was life for thousands since 1940, and by July 1942, the Frank family had gone into hiding to avoid forced placement in Nazi work camps. They took refuge in a secret annex behind the office building where Otto worked, and it was here that they and four others would share the cramped quarters and a single toilet for over two years, with a few of Otto’s former employees their only link to the outside world.

Comfortably surrounded by the luxury of the Doubleday apartment, Jones sat engrossed in Anne’s story, witnessing a girl coming of age under the most extraordinary circumstances one could imagine. That first kiss in the park or on a playground, the lessons learned in a schoolhouse, the relationships developed at home with loved ones, for Anne, all took place in the small attic where she wrote about them.

Jones read all afternoon and didn’t stop until she reached the final entry, August 1, 1944–the day that Nazi police discovered and arrested the Franks. Anne, who in previous entries wrote at length about her dream of becoming a journalist, would never write again.

“It was beyond me how this remarkable story, which was beautifully written, ended up in the rejection pile,” says Jones. “When my boss came back to the apartment, he asked me what I was still doing there, and I just looked at him and said, ‘We have got to send this book to New York. It must be published.’”

Though Jones distinctly remembers her boss’s reluctance over the idea of “a book by a kid,” she still convinced him to let their colleagues in New York look at it. The moment they did, they were 100% behind it and gave the okay to draw up a contract.

Before they could move forward, Otto Frank wanted to meet with Jones and Price to better understand their intentions for his daughter’s work, which he had discovered following his release from a concentration camp after the war.

“We invited him to have lunch with us at the Doubleday apartment office in Paris, where we talked over a wonderful meal,” Jones recalls. “What I remember most about the meeting came at the end. As we were finishing lunch, Otto Frank looked at me and my boss and said, ‘The one thing that I must keep is the dramatic rights because I could not bear to see anyone playing my Annie.’”

Obviously, someone persuaded Frank otherwise some years later, but Jones says that the notion clearly seemed inconceivable to him as they sat in the elegant dining room along the rue de la Faisanderie.

“For me, the meeting was a very moving experience, and Anne’s diary an incredibly important work,” she says. “You have to keep in mind that, particularly at this point in time, no one had talked about the Holocaust all that much, and here we had in our hands a first-person account of what it was like.”

In an entry dated April 5, 1944, Anne thanked God for giving her the gift of writing. “I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met,” she wrote. “I want to go on living even after my death!”

And that’s exactly what she’s doing through the words of her diary.