Officials in the Netherlands are taking legal advice about how they can recover five missing pages from the Diary of Anne Frank -- a young Jewish girl's account of her life hidden from the Nazis in wartime Amsterdam.

A former Dutch employee of the Anne Frank Foundation, Cor Suijk, said on television this week he won't surrender the five missing pages from the diary, unless the Foundation finances his independent research in the United States.

The pages -- believed to contain Anne Frank's assessment of her parents' marriage -- were given to him by her father who died in 1980.