ANNE FRANK’S DIARY, written in hiding in the occupied Netherlands, has, in the
60 years since it was first published, become the poignant voice of the
generation of Jews who died at the hands of Nazi Germany. It has sold 75
million copies, is read in schools worldwide and inspired the establishment
of the Anne Frank Foundation, which campaigns against antiSemitism and
racism.
The diary is intimate and personal, but Anne has become an icon. Her name and
photograph so immediately evoke the Holocaust that the sparky young teenager
herself has become indistinguishable from her wider significance.
But one woman who still remembers the little girl before she became a tragic
symbol is Jacqueline van Maarsen, Anne’s best friend at school. She has
written about their friendship and her wartime experiences in a book now
translated into English for the first time.
It is named after the first words Anne spoke to the 12-year-old Jacqueline:
“My name is Anne,” she said, “Anne Frank.”
She remembers vividly this moment that illustrates the difference between the
two. It was Jacqueline’s first day at the Jewish Lyceum, which she had to
attend instead of the Girls’ Lyceum where her nonJewish friends were
beginning secondary school.
“When we met, it was the first day in the classroom. But I didn’t really meet
her then, because I didn’t see her. Anne was the kind of girl who thought
that the whole world was looking at her – maybe it doesn’t sound so nice,
but afterwards I understood that many people are like that. But I was just
the opposite; I was shy and didn’t think much of myself. After school she
came bicycling behind me, she called my name, and I didn’t know hers. That
was awkward so she said: ‘My name is Anne. Anne Frank’. ”
The friendship flourished, with the girls relatively unaware of the increasing
turmoil around them. Jacqueline still lives in Amsterdam, near where both
had their homes. As she shows me the route she used to walk from her house
to Anne’s, she talks about their adventures and their inventiveness in the
face of Nazi strictures.
“It was frightening to see German soldiers in the streets,” she says, “but we
were young and we thought that the war couldn’t last much longer. We knew
that the Allies were already against Germany.”
But their life was increasingly curtailed; they had curfews, could not use the
swimming baths, or sit on a bench, or ride a bicycle. “But,” Jacqueline
says, “we were 12, so we couldn’t go out much anyway.
“At that time we were quite happy in each other’s company. We liked to go to
school, where we were very close because we all had the same fate, even the
teachers. We invented a little cinema at home because it was forbidden for
Jews to go to the cinema and we enjoyed making preparations for that,
invitations and so on.” She shows me a poetry book containing a poem by Anne
and another poem, saying: “This is from Ilse, one of the girls that Anne
writes about in her diary. Ilse wrote a little poem in which she mentions a
long happy life, and afterwards I found out that she had died less than a
year later. I say this to show how little we knew – that she could write
about a long happy life in the middle of everything that was happening.”
She shows me Ilse’s name in a densely printed, thin-leaved book the size of a
dictionary. It records the Dutch Jews who died in the concentration camps.
She shows me Anne’s name and a few others. After a while, she says, she
simply didn’t have the heart to look up people.
Most of Jacqueline’s family and friends were Jewish but her mother was
Catholic, with four Catholic grandparents. Behind her Jewish husband’s back,
she asked the Nazis to revoke her Jewish status and that of her children.
Her husband paid a doctor to certify that he had had a vasectomy, so was
exempt from being called up. One by one, Jacqueline watched as her friends
from the Jewish Lyceum and her uncles, aunts and cousins disappeared, were
called up or captured. Anne’s went into hiding, faking a flight to
Switzerland. They were betrayed and captured in 1944.
Very few of the missing came back but one who did was Otto Frank, Anne’s
father. Jacqueline remembers that “he came to our house, he looked very sad
and he was very old and thin”.
He knew that his wife was dead. She had gone to Auschwitz, and Anne and her
sister to Bergen-Belsen. “The few Jews who came back from the camps, he
tried to ask all of them: ‘Have you seen my daughters? Eventually he met two
women who told him: ‘Your daughters are dead.’ Later on I heard this lady
say that it was very difficult to tell a father that his daughters were
dead.” Otto poured his remaining strength into publishing his daughter’s
diary. Jacqueline was reluctant to identify herself with it. She had lost
most of her friends and family and was loath to grieve specifically or
publicly for Anne.
“No,” she says, “there was no reason to. There were so many dead, there was
nothing special about Anne. Later on, she became famous, and I found out
that people were pretending that they knew her, writing about her, making
themselves interesting by claiming friendship. The more I found out about
it, the less I liked it. Of course my husband knew, and my children. But I
said to them: ‘At school when they talk about Anne Frank, don’t say “my
mother was Anne’s friend”, I don’t like that.’ I didn’t want them to make
themselves important because of their mother and I didn’t want to make
myself important because Anne was my best friend. I was a bookbinder, I
wanted my own life and my own identity. So I never talked about it.”
But antiSemitism never went away and later in Jacqueline’s life she wanted to
raise awareness of the Holocaust. As she makes clear, it is far from her
nature to talk about herself, but she has spoken widely about her book, to
tell the story of the Dutch Jews.
To her unease, the first country outside the Netherlands to publish it was
Germany. “We never wanted to go to Germany for holidays,” she remembers,
“and when they came to the Netherlands, we always thought: ‘Well, you must
have been a Nazi’.” But she adds: “By now, the Germans are the grandchildren
of these Nazis.” She has spoken in Germany, particularly to children.
“Children are well aware now of what happened,” she says. “The schools are
very good about teaching the children their history. We went to Wannsee, the
beautiful place near a lake where high-ranking Nazis came together and
decided that the Jews must be gassed. It’s a museum now, frightening to see,
and when we visited, a teacher came with her class and she told them all
about it. I was very pleased about that.”
It must be strange, I say, that her childhood friend, dead for more than 60
years, continues to be so important in her life. “It is,” she says. “This
little girl, who I knew, was intelligent, among other intelligent children.
And now the whole world knows about her.
“When people in the street ask me: ‘Where is the Anne Frank House?’ or I hear
that President Clinton has spoken about her in a speech, I think about this
little girl and how she would have enjoyed being so much in the picture.
Anne would have been very happy if she had known.”
THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL by Anne Frank
Penguin (60th anniversary edition), £7.99; 341pp
Buy
the book here for the offer price of £7.59 (free p&p)
MY NAME IS ANNE, SHE SAID, ANNE FRANK by Jacqueline van Maarsen
translated by Hester Velmans
Arcadia, £15.99; 176pp
Buy
the book here for the offer price of £14.39 (free p&p)
