Belsen Survivor's Memories of Anne Frank Draw Skepticism

Holocaust survivor Berthe Meijer, who was liberated from Bergen-Belsen at the age of seven, remembers Anne Frank as an inspired storyteller who tried to boost the spirits of the camp's youngest prisoners with fairy tales about about princes and elves as the shadow of death waited nearby. Meijer's memoir, Life After Anne Frank, is set to be published in Dutch this month; its version of Anne Frank's final weeks has already attracted some skepticism from a number of people involved with Anne Frank's story.

The Unconvinced

-- Historian David Barnouw, who contributed to the academic Critical Edition of Anne Frank's diary, dismisses Meijer's account on the grounds that "it would be an amazing coincidence that Meijer would have a memory about someone who only became well known many years later." And that, already mortally ill with typhus, Anne Frank was probably in no shape for entertaining children -- an objection also raised by Hanneli Goslar, one of Anne Frank's closest friends and one of the last people to see her alive at Belsen: "In that condition, you almost died... You had no strength to tell stories."

-- The Dutch filmmaker Willy Lindwer didn't include Meijer in his documentary The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, which features interviews with several women who knew Anne Frank in the camps, because he found her testimony too vague to be credible: "Berthe... had not more than a very vague recollection of this concentration camp," he said in an emailed message to the Associated Press. “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.”

On the other hand...

-- Records obtained by the Associated Press from Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust documentation authority, prove that Berthe Meijer was indeed a prisoner at Bergen-Belsen for 13 months -- including the time Anne Frank was held at the camp -- until liberation in the spring of 1945.

-- Meijer says she and her family knew the Franks before they went into hiding: they were all German-Jewish refugees living in the same South Amsterdam neighborhood, with Berthe's family living on Niersstraat, where Anne Frank attended the Sixth Public Montessori School.

-- The Anne Frank House itself stands by the claims made in Meijer's memoir. A spokesperson for the institution says that Meijer has already been interviewed by a number of museum historians about her memories of Anne Frank, and they have no cause to doubt her recollections -- "It could very well be true."

Of course it could. But what to make of all this?

I'm certain that, whatever really went down at Bergen-Belsen, Berthe Meijer isn't deliberately misleading people in order to sell books. There are a few notoriously fraudulent Holocaust memoirs out there, to be sure -- Wilkomirski's Fragments and that book about a girl who survived the Holocaust by living with a pack of wolves come to mind -- but their authors had no experience whatsoever with the subjects they wrote about. Meijers is a documented survivor, someone who endured the hell of Belsen at a young age and presumably understands the gravity of her past well enough to avoid lying about it. Maybe she really does believe Anne Frank told her stories there, but this is impossible to verify, and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't happen at all. In the end, we'll probably never know one way or another.

U.S. Congress Honors Miep Gies With a Bill

At the end of February, Congress unanimously passed a resolution that paid tribute to the life of Miep Gies, recognizing her courage in helping to hide the Franks and in preserving Anne's diary after the Nazis raided the Annex.

The bill's sponsor, Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy, spoke in Congress on behalf of the resolution:

Why is it important to honor Miep Gies?

I recently visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. It is an overwhelming experience, and as we ponder the horror of Hitler's plan to eradicate the Jewish people, we ask ourselves: How could this have happened? How could so many stand by silently? How could so many actually participate?

So it is important, I think, to understand that there are some who spoke up, heroes like Miep Gies, and it is important to honor people like her, people who helped the Jews, who worked against the sea of hatred that had enveloped most of Europe at that time--people like Miep Gies, an ordinary woman, who did an extraordinary thing.

She was born to a German Catholic family in Austria on February 15, 1909. When she was 11, her family sent her to live with a foster family in the Netherlands to escape food shortages in postwar Austria. She worked as a servant, as a seamstress, as waitress. Then, in 1933, she took a job with an Amsterdam manufacturing company owned by Otto Frank, a German Jew, who left Frankfurt when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and when the organized attacks on the Jews began, including the boycott on
Jewish businesses.

Ms. Gies quickly became friends with the Frank family. On July 6, 1942, more than 2 years into the German occupation of the Netherlands, Otto Frank; his wife, Edith; and his daughters, Margot and Anne, went into hiding in a secret annex behind a bookshelf in Otto Frank's office. They were later joined by Hermann and Auguste Van Pels; their son, Peter; and Fritz Pfeffer.

For 2 more years, Miep Gies, along with her husband, Jan, and three other employees of Otto Frank, risked their lives to supply the eight people in hiding with food, clothing, with news from the outside, and with paper for Anne to write on.

As Anne noted in her diary, ``Miep has so much to carry; she looks like a pack mule. She goes forth nearly every day, scrounging for vegetables, and then bicycles back with her purchases in large shopping bags.''

Miep is also the one who brought five library books to Anne every Saturday. She did this during a time of war. It [Page: H675]
was a time of shortages, a time when getting food meant managing ration coupons. Despite their efforts, though, on August 4, 1944, the Gestapo raided the secret hiding place, and they captured the eight hideaways who were betrayed by an anonymous tip.

Miep Gies discovered the pages of the diary that Anne kept during her time in hiding, and Miep locked them in a desk drawer for safekeeping. When she learned that Margot and Anne had died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, she returned Anne's diary to Otto Frank, the only one of the eight to have survived the Holocaust.

As was noted, she passed away recently, on January 11, 2010, at the age of 100, but she kept alive a very important part of Holocaust history by preserving Anne's diary and by helping us to learn, to understand and to remember so it will not happen again.

Thanks to Miep Gies' bravery, Anne's recollections have been preserved for future generations. Miep later described her efforts to assist the eight people in hiding, saying, ``Of course, it's nice to be appreciated, but I only did my duty to my fellow man. I helped people in need. Anyone can do that, can't they?''

This understated appraisal of her heroic acts is just one example of her modesty and her integrity. We can learn much from Miep Gies, an ordinary woman, who showed extraordinary courage in the face of unspeakable peril during Nazi occupation and the Holocaust. She is a powerful symbol of resistance against oppression and injustice. She is an example of our human capacity to rise even to the most daunting of challenges.

I urge my colleagues to join me in recognizing this incredible woman's life and legacy.

You can see video of this speech, along with the rest of the text, here.