According to Berthe Meijer, now 71, famous diariest Anne Frank distracted younger children in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp where both children were incarcerated with fairy tales. Meijer, only 6 years old when she knew Frank, who was then a teenager, paints a heart wrenching picture of Anne in the last few weeks of her life in the Nazi camp, trying desperately to keep her own spirits up as she tried to keep the younger children’s hope alive. However, at least one Frank authority and a childhood friend of Frank’s doubt that Meijer’s story is accurate.
Frank’s famous diary makes it clear that she had a gift for stories, but Meijer’s memoir, being published in Dutch later this month, is the first to mention Anne’s talent for spinning tales even in the despair of the camp. “The Diary of Anne Frank” is based on a diary the young girl kept during two years in hiding with her family in Amsterdam. The scattered pages were collected and published after the war in what became the most widely read book to emerge from the Holocaust.
Annemarie Bekker, a spokeswoman for the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, said Berthe Meijer has been interviewed by museum specialists and they had no reason to doubt Meijer’s testimony. But Hannah Pick-Goslar, a childhood friend of Frank’s who also met her at the concentration camp, has doubts.
“In that condition, you almost died,” she said in a telephone call from her home in Jerusalem. ”You had no strength to tell stories.”
Willy Lindwer, a Dutch filmmaker who won an Emmy for his documentary about Frank’s life said that he interviewed Meijer for the film and also found her story less than convincing.
“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.”
Anne Frank made her final diary entry August 1, 1944. She died in a typhus epidemic in the Bergan Belsen concentration camp 8 months later, just two weeks before the camp was liberated. She was 15 years old.
Comments
Are there inexpensive thick mattress covers for hospital beds?
March 18th, 2010 - 12:46:22 PM
[...] Does Berthe Meijer's Book Shine Further Light on Anne Frank? | KidGlue [...]
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Pwll
March 18th, 2010 - 8:52:34 PM
However, even if the girl telling the stories was not Anne Frank the fact that someone was helping the littler children by telling the stories is important. The real story is not who, but what.
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Rudolf Frank
April 29th, 2010 - 4:04:24 PM
I am 4 years older than Berthe Meijer and I too have been in Bergen-Belsen and I remember the situation in that concentrationcamp very well. The camp was divided in subcamps. Berthe Meijer was in the same part as I, the so-called Sternlager, where to dutch families with their children had been brought from Holland. Anne Frank lived in a different part, the "Kleines Frauenlager" for women who had been transported from Auschwitz and it was totally impossible to come from the one part into the other. Only e.g. nurses with a special permission could enter that camp from our Sternlager. There is no further light shining from Berthe's book on Anne Frank
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