Zionist Jewish Eternal Legends

Anne Frank kept storytelling alive in Nazi camp, survivor says

Dutch Cartoon showing
Hitler and Anne Frank In Bed Together

AMSTERDAM - A Holocaust survivor claims in a new book that Anne Frank distracted younger children from the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp by telling them fairy tales - an account disputed by at least one Frank authority and a childhood friend of the diarist.

The story by Berthe Meijer, now 71, of being a 6-year-old inmate of Bergen-Belsen, crafts a touching portrait of Frank in the final weeks of her life in the German camp, struggling to keep up her own spirits even as she tried to lift the morale of the smaller children.

That Frank had a gift for storytelling was evident from the diary she kept during two years in hiding with her family in Amsterdam.

But Meijer's memoir, being published in Dutch later this month, is the first to mention Frank's talent for spinning tales even in the despair of the camp.

The memoir deals with Meijer's acquaintance with Frank in only a few pages, but she said she titled it "Life After Anne Frank" because it continues the tale of Holocaust victims where the famous diary leaves off.

What story would AF tell today?

"The dividing line is where the diary of Anne Frank ends. Because then you fall into a big black hole," Meijer told The Associated Press at her Amsterdam home.

Annemarie Bekker, a spokeswoman for the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam said Berthe Meijer has previously been interviewed by museum historians and she had no reason to doubt Meijer's testimony.

"It could very well be true," Bekker said. "We can't confirm it or deny it."

But Hannah Pick-Goslar, a childhood friend of Frank who also met her in Bergen-Belsen, said she doubted Meijer's recollection was accurate.

"In that condition, you almost died," she said in a telephone call from her home in Jerusalem. "You had no strength to tell stories."

Dutch filmmaker Willy Lindwer, who made an Emmy Award-winning documentary about Anne Frank, said he interviewed Meijer for the film and found her story unconvincing.

"Berthe ... had not more than a very vague recollection of this concentration camp," he said in an e-mailed message to the AP. "She recalled the image of an older girl who told stories to younger children. It may have been Anne Frank, but also maybe not. Very vague."

Frank and her older sister Margot died in March 1945 in a typhus epidemic that swept through Bergen-Belsen, just two weeks before the camp was liberated. She was 15.

"The stories Anne told were fairy tales in which nasty things happened, and that was of course very much related to the war," Meijer said. "But as a kid you get lifted out of the everyday nastiness. That's something I remember. You're listening to someone telling something that has nothing to do with what's happening around you - so it's a bit of escape."

"The stories she told in the camp were about princes and elves and those kind of figures," Meijer said. "Despite having unhappy twists, the tales were quite a bit less terrible than what we saw around us. So you thought: they didn't have it so bad. As a child, you think very primitively about that kind of thing."

The Meijers and the Franks were acquaintances before the war: members of both families had fled Germany during the rise of Hitler's regime and found a place in Amsterdam. The Meijers lived on the same street where Anne attended a Montessori elementary school.

Dr. Alan Hilfer, director of psychology at Maimonides Medical Center in New York, said it's plausible that Meijer would have recognized Frank and stored the memory all these years if she knew her before the war and if she met her again at the camp.

Meijer acknowledged that her recollections of the Frank sisters were fleeting.

She said there were many reasons she had waited until now to tell her story - not least that she was busy growing up, having a career and raising a family.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1157264.html