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.

Inheriting Anne Frank

Anne Frank and Jacqueline van Maarsen's friendship was short-lived -- spanning the nine months they were forced to attend the Jewish Lyceum in 1941-42. But what it lacked in time was made up for in intensity. In the opening pages of her Diary, Anne calls van Maarsen her best friend; and it is to her alone whom Anne writes a farewell letter from her isolated Secret Annex. For a long time after the war, van Maarsen chose to remain silent about her connection to Anne and the Diary (where is she referred to as "Jacque" or Jopie"). Hoping to clear up common misconceptions about her now-famous friend, she eventually came clean about her past and published a series of books on their relationship and her own tale of survival. She even appeared in the documentary Anne Frank Remembered.

The newest installation of van Maarsen's memoirs, called Inheriting Anne Frank, was just released in the UK last month, and looks like a worthwhile read. (Unfortunately, it isn't scheduled to be released here the US until this summer.)

More about the book from the Financial Times:

Following the end of the war and Frank’s death, van Maarsen struck a close and lasting friendship with Otto, her friend’s father, and became involved in his efforts to share the message of his daughter’s diary. The published work received a mixed reception from her contemporaries and an overwhelmingly positive one from young people.

Nonetheless, van Maarsen is critical of the commercialisation of the diary and its legacy, and of some of the work of the Anne Frank Foundation.

But Inheriting Anne Frank is also a historical document about the author’s own life, and in particular her relationship with a formidable mother, who died in 1992 aged 101. A lovely companion to what remains the most famous diary in the world.

Books to Watch For: A History of the Frank Family

This has apparently been out since October, but I'm just hearing about it now. And it's only available in German, as far as I know.

Written by Mirjam Pressler -- familiar to Anne Frank enthusiasts as the editor of the newest edition of the Diary, and as it's Dutch-German translator -- with help from Bernd Elias's wife, Gerti Wiedner, this book, called Grüße und Küsse an alle: Die Geschichte der Familie von Anne Frank (Greetings and Kisses to All: The History of the Family of Anne Frank), is described as a comprehensive history of Anne Frank's family, presenting us with snapshots from other points in history than the one we tend to associate with the family Frank. We get sketches of a boy who would grow up to become Anne Frank's great-great grandfather, living in Frankfurt's notorious ghetto, the Judengasse, and the relative who, according to the book at least, became Germany's first Jewish professor. There are also some wartime and postwar scenes of the Frank family, which by then had been scattered to several countries. And reportedly a great deal of previously unpublished photos and facsimiles throughout, which I'm really looking forward to seeing.

Having not read it myself yet, I can't speak to anything beyond the mostly positive summaries and reviews I've seen online. But it looks promising and I think I'll end up buying it soon. I can't help thinking of the downside, though, which is: it only covers the better-known half of Anne frank's family tree -- Otto's side (maybe because there were more close survivors -- who knows?) -- further obscuring the history of her mother's forgotten family, the Holländers, which will have to wait for another book to come along before it can be brought to life.