I was 11 when the Germans invaded Holland. I remember seeing the planes flying overhead and sensing the great agitation of my parents. I thought we might get bombed or we might not get enough food, but the idea that we faced another threat because we were Jewish didn’t even enter my head. My mother was a Parisian Catholic, and although my father had registered us as Jewish in Amsterdam in 1938 — he wanted us to be part of the Jewish community, like the rest of his Dutch family — my older sister and I weren’t really brought up as Jewish.

A year into the occupation, things began to change: I couldn’t go to the swimming pool any more, and young men were being rounded up and sent to Germany. At the end of the school year, in 1941, the headmistress called a group of us to her office and told us that because we were Jewish we must leave the school. After, some boys followed us, calling us Jews. It was my first experience of anti-Semitism. I felt very humiliated.

In October 1941 I started at the Jewish lyceum and I became good friends with Anne Frank. I don’t know why she chose me as her best friend. She was very extroverted and I was just the opposite. She would take me out to meet friends and visit the ice-cream shop. We would do our homework and she would talk a lot. We’d also play Monopoly and cut pictures of film stars out of magazines. I remember her showing me the red-and- green diary she received from her parents on her 13th birthday — she was so happy with it. Nobody was allowed to read it.

At the beginning of 1942 we had to start wearing the Star of David. I hated it — I didn’t want to feel different. With all the anti-Semitic propaganda around I started to think I must be inferior. There was so much we couldn’t do. Apparently I once said to Anne that I felt I didn’t dare do anything, because I thought it must be forbidden. I read that later in her diary, which is all so honest — apart from some ideas about boys being in love with her, which she probably imagined.

Anne and I didn’t want to think about the bad things that were happening. We knew that people had vanished, but we wouldn’t talk about it. Anne’s family were one of the first to go into hiding, although we had no idea. Otto, Anne’s father, left a note with an address in Switzerland, saying they had gone to his family. I was disappointed not to get a farewell letter from Anne, but I thought the war wouldn’t last much longer and I’d see her soon.

Nobody could bring themselves to believe the rumours of the gas chambers. But my mother did. She’d heard it from someone who worked with the Nazis in Amsterdam. She decided to try and have us removed from the Jewish register by convincing the German authorities she didn’t agree with her husband and his religion. It was very brave of her; others who had tried had been severely beaten. She was lucky: because she had not been born Jewish and because she was French, elegant and pretty, she succeeded. My mother tried to persuade my father’s brothers and sister to go into hiding, but they were fearful of being punished. I remember very well my cousins being deported. My father was allowed to remain because he had a non-Jewish wife, but he had to be sterilised. Luckily, a doctor gave him a false certificate.

The hunger winter of 1944-5 was very difficult. We had to eat sugar beet and tulip bulbs — I can still taste their sourness. I would think a lot about Anne, living in better circumstances in Switzerland. Then, after the liberation in May 1945, Otto Frank turned up at our door. We were so surprised at how wretched he looked. He had these very sad eyes. He told us his family, including Anne, had gone into hiding in Amsterdam and had been betrayed and deported to Westerbork, where the men and women were separated. He had survived at Auschwitz, though his wife had died there, but he knew nothing about Anne or Margot, Anne’s older sister. It was such

a shock to hear that Anne had been in Amsterdam all that time. Otto asked around for information from the few survivors returning from the camps. Eventually two ladies from Rotterdam told him they had seen Anne and Margot dying in Bergen-Belsen. I was so very sad.

Otto gave me a copy of the farewell letter Anne wrote to me in hiding. I was surprised because there were two letters: the second was a reply to a letter she pretended I had written to her. She wrote: “I am thinking so much of you,” and “Let’s always be good friends until I come back.” She must have been very lonely.

I felt so sorry for this little girl in hiding, especially because she was such a lively girl, who loved to meet people.

I thought of how happy she had been before. She had a very short life, but she enjoyed it so much. Even to this day I have never known anyone who enjoyed life as much as Anne did.

My Name Is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank, by Jacqueline van Maarsen, is published by Arcadia Books, £15.99

Photograph: Chris de Bode

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