'Your best friend, Anne'
Jacqueline Sanders-van Maarsen vor dem Anne Frank Haus, 2003.26 July 2008
By Shaul Adar
Amsterdam - The year was 1938, and the portents were clear. German Jewry had been subjected to persecution since the Nazis' rise to power five years earlier, and Hitler's expansionist ambitions were no secret. The danger of war hovered over Europe, but Hyman Van Maarsen - a Jewish book dealer from Amsterdam who was married to Eline, a French Catholic who had undergone a very liberal conversion in Paris - had made up his mind. After years in which the Jewish community had not recognized his wife's conversion, and even though he was secular, he managed to register her as a member of the city's large Jewish community. From that moment on, the family, including the two daughters, was considered Jewish, with all the ramifications that entailed.
Two years later, the Germans occupied Holland and Van Maarsen's achievement became a risk factor. Restrictions were imposed on the Jews: They were barred from entering parks, cinemas, swimming pools and many other public places. They were required to wear yellow patches and children in public schools were forced to transfer to Jewish schools.
In October 1941, Jacqueline Van Maarsen, then 12, returned from her first day at the Jewish school to her home in south Amsterdam. A new classmate joined her, riding on a bike. "My name is Anne," she introduced herself. "Anne Frank."
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It was the start of a close friendship that lasted nine months, until it was interrupted when the Frank family went into hiding on July 6, 1942. The two girls became best friends, in Anne Frank's words, and spent many hours together nearly every day. "Today it's obvious that my father's move was a mistake that endangered our lives," says Jacqueline Van Maarsen, now 89, in her apartment in south Amsterdam. "Holland was neutral in the First World War and he believed, like many other people, that we wouldn't get involved this time, either. But it would have been better if he hadn't registered us as a Jewish family. Still, it was because of this that I got to meet Anne. That was the only positive thing to come out of it."
Van Maarsen lays out on the table the Monopoly board, illustrated with the streets of Amsterdam, that she and Anne once played with; the children's book she received from her as a gift for her 13th birthday; a New Year's Day postcard Anne sent her; and Jacqueline's school yearbook.
"This girl died in the war," says Van Maarsen as she pages through the yearbook. "This one survived." The number of victims exceeds the number of survivors, and in the center of the book there is a dedication with a small picture of Anne Frank:
Amsterdam, 23 March 1942
Dearest Jackie,
Always be a ray of light
And a good student, too
And then, you, my friend
I shall always remember
Remember your dear friend
Anne Frank
Margot's bra
A constant menace hung over the school on the banks of the Amstel River. The number of students and teachers steadily dwindled. Some left to go into hiding, but most were arrested by the police and the Gestapo and transferred to the Westerbrook transit camp in northern Holland. From there they were usually sent to their deaths in Germany or Poland. In one class, only three out of the 50 pupils who began the year were around to take final exams in April 1943, and by the end of the year, only one female pupil remained.
"It was a difficult time, but in a strange way we loved the Jewish school," says Van Maarsen. "Yes, we suddenly felt singled out and we had to leave our regular school, but I had good friends in the school, including Anne, and the teachers and pupils had a sense of shared fate."
It was a strange friendship. Anne was an outgoing girl - attention-seeking, nervy and flirtatious. Jacqueline was shy and quiet. "When she chose me as her friend, I was very surprised," says Van Maarsen. "Maybe she liked my black hair and blue eyes. We were two opposites. She talked all the time, and I didn't talk very much. She excelled at doing her homework and I didn't. I liked geography and history and she thought you could just read the facts in books, and didn't understand why we had to study these subjects. I was a lot better in math and I helped her. We complemented one another."
Van Maarsen says she didn't discern anything special in Anne. "She was funny and a good friend but also annoying at times, the kind of girl who always says what she wants to say even if it's not always nice. We spent a lot of time together - playing, strolling around town, going to the places we were still able to visit, like the ice cream store. She didn't write much in those days. I think that her writing talent only developed from the time she started writing the diary. I can't say that I saw something special in Anne, but she saw something special in herself."
One of the most famous girls of the 20th century, if not the most famous, Anne was intelligent and had a tremendous appetite for life, according to Van Maarsen. "Anne always needed to have people around her," she says. "She really enjoyed life. She organized parties and screenings of films at her house, and games. I never met anyone who enjoyed life as much as she did, but it wasn't always easy being around her. She was possessive and reacted with jealousy if I got close to other girls. In her diary she wrote that I got close to a girl named Ilsa, and became childish and condescending. I thought there was tension between Anne and this girl, who was very pretty, with curls, but then Anne added a few lines later on where she wrote that I was sweet again and that she was sorry for what she wrote before. At the time, I didn't notice all these details in the life of a group of girls. I just lived my little life and didn't care, but sometimes her jealousy was hard for me to deal with."
Those weren't the only difficulties. Anne wrote about in her diary: "I proposed to Jackie that we touch one another's breasts as proof of our friendship. Jackie refused."
Says Van Maarsen: "She wasn't pleased with my refusal and was only satisfied when I let her kiss me on the cheek. I prefer to think that she was just curious. She was flat-chested and filled the bra of Margot, her big sister, with cotton. I didn't need that. Some people think that it went beyond curiosity, but I don't know. It was embarrassing then, too, and I thought that I had to get away from her a little, and she got sad and angry, but I felt a need to set boundaries. She was demanding and this was an opportunity to tell her not to go so far."
Was there competition over who was Anne's best friend?
"Then, there wasn't any competition like that. But today there is. To me, there was no competition, but just a group of girls with Anne at the center - although not always in the way she described in her diary. She said that all the boys fell in love with her, but I didn't notice that. Years later, I met a woman who told me that her father had been in our class and that Anne noted in her diary that he was in love with her, but she found him unbearable. I asked the woman what her father thought of this; she replied that her father said he was never in love with Anne. Anne wrote about a guy named Helo who was also in love with her, but he said he thought Anne was nice and interesting, but Margot was the one he was really in love with."
No farewell letter
Life got harder and harder, but the girls were relatively protected. Their parents tried to shield them from rumors about the fate of the Jews in occupied Europe, and they were able to maintain an almost normal lifestyle, despite the growing restrictions. "I don't dare do anything because I'm always afraid that it's forbidden," Anne quotes Jackie in her diary. "We played ping-pong with other girls," says Van Maarsen. "I remember the books we read together that influenced her, I remember the games of Monopoly, the homework we did together. She was always very diligent. I remember that we cut out pictures of movie stars that she took with her. I remember sitting on the roof and all the chats we had."
On June 12, 1942, Anne celebrated her 13th birthday with a party at her home. A few days before that, she went with her father to a nearby shop and picked out her gift: a diary with a checkered cover. The shop on Rooseveltlaan is still in business at the same location and is included in the guided tours 'in the footsteps of Anne Frank' that pass by every so often. It was Anne's last birthday at home. Less than a month later, Van Maarsen came to the apartment one day and found it empty. Most of the household objects remained there; the bed was unmade, and one of Anne's favorite pairs of shoes had also been left behind. On the door was a note saying the family had moved to Switzerland.
Van Maarsen: "I was surprised, because we had promised one another to write farewell letters, and I thought there would be such a letter in the house, but I didn't find it. I also searched for the diary. I wanted to see what she wrote about us. But, more than anything, I was surprised and thought there must be a good reason why she didn't say goodbye to me. Had the situation been reversed, I think Anne would have been mad at me for disappearing without saying goodbye to her, but I just accepted it. I wanted to take some of Anne's things from the apartment, but it was dangerous."
The four members of the Frank family, together with another four Jews from Amsterdam, had entered a hiding place in the apartment above the office housing the business run by Otto Frank, Anne's father. There, Anne lived and wrote in her diary until the Dutch police, under Austrian command, raided the hideout. That was on August 4, 1944. The eight Jews were transferred to Gestapo headquarters in the south of the city and from there to the Westerbrook camp in the north of the country. A month later, on September 3, 1944, the last transport of Jews left Westerbrook for Auschwitz. All eight were on board. Only one of them, Otto Frank, returned to Amsterdam after the war. The other seven perished at different camps in Europe. Anne and her older sister, Margot, died of hunger and typhus at Bergen-Belsen about three weeks before the British army liberated the camp.
After the raid, books and other possessions of the eight Jews were left scattered on the floor of the hideout. Miep Gies, a family friend who had looked after the needs of the Jews while they were in hiding, picked up Anne's diary and hid it away in a drawer for safekeeping until the girl returned to Amsterdam. Gies did not read the personal diary; she asserted that if she had read it, she would have destroyed it, because of the information it contained about Dutch civilians who assisted the group in hiding - information that could have put their lives at risk. Gies kept the diary for eight months before she was able to return it to Otto Frank. And then Anne's wish to become a famous writer came true.
No one spoke about it
In the winter of 1942, raids by the Gestapo and police increased; young Jews were apprehended and sent to labor camps in Germany. Eline Van Maarsen realized that she had to do something before her family was harmed. The elegant Frenchwoman, who managed the dress department of the city's largest department store, put on her fanciest dress, carefully applied her makeup and boarded the tram for Euterpestraat, site of Gestapo headquarters. (Even today, with the building restored to its original use as a school and the street name changed to Gerrit van der Veenstraat, there is still something menacing about the fortress-like structure. Only a few hundred meters separate it from Jacqueline Van Maarsen's present home. Almost every day, she passes by the place where the fate of so many of her fellow Jews was sealed, while her family was fortunate enough to survive.)
Eline Van Maarsen asked to see the police commander and spoke with him in French. She explained that her husband had registered her and her daughters as Jews without her knowledge or consent. The commander was impressed by her and asked to see documents proving that she was not Jewish. When these arrived - with the help of a relative who ran a restaurant on the Champs-Elysees that was a favorite of high-ranking Nazis in Paris - the status of the females in the family was altered. The yellow patch was removed from their clothing, and Jacqueline and her sister Christine went back to being Catholics and ordinary Dutch citizens.
"My mother made us swear not to tell our father about this until it was official. She knew that he would object, but she was determined to do whatever was necessary in order to save us," says Van Maarsen. "It was a dangerous thing to do. There were people who entered Gestapo headquarters with a similar request and ended up being tortured. It wasn't a place where you wanted to proclaim your connection with Jews. This was a radical change in our lives, but I understood exactly why she made this move. Afterward, too, my father was upset, and my mother forbade me and my sister to talk about it. It created tension at home, but it saved my life and his life." All of Hyman Van Maarsen's relatives were sent to Sobibor, where they were killed in the gas chambers.
"I didn't feel guilty," says his daughter. "There was a sense of relief and concern for friends and family. Not for Anne. I thought she was safe in Switzerland. In the winter of 1944, when there was terrible starvation in Holland and thousands of people were dying of hunger and we were forced to survive on tulip bulbs, I remember that I was jealous of her, because I thought she was living comfortably in Switzerland."
Van Maarsen transferred back to a regular school. "At home we never spoke about a Jewish identity," she says. "The first time I encountered anti-Semitism was when I put on the yellow patch. My big disappointment with the behavior of the Dutch during the war was at the regular school that I transferred to. No one spoke about the Jews, and I was too shy to talk about what was happening to the Jews. My relatives were disappearing one after the other, but I couldn't talk about it in school. There was general indifference."
A little kiss from Anne
In May 1945, Holland was liberated. That summer, Otto Frank returned and went to the home of Miep Gies. He knew that his wife, Edith, was dead, but he still hoped and prayed that his daughters had survived. He met Van Maarsen, who learned then for the first time about the secret annex and the family's deportation to the camps, and they met again a few weeks later. In the meantime, Frank found out that his daughters had died at Bergen-Belsen - sick, bald and with nothing but parasite-infested blankets. The bereaved father wanted to hear again and again about the friendship between the two girls, about the days when Anne was a child like any other and loved her life.
Van Maarsen: "In those months, he came to our house over and over again and cried all the time. It seemed strange to me at the time, because I looked up to him as an adult, and I didn't want to think about the war. It was hard to cope with it all. My friend was dead, and I felt great sorrow for him and for others. My father's entire family died in the Holocaust. My two cousins, who were my age and whom I played with and was close to, were murdered in Sobibor. Otto wanted to talk with me every time about Anne and about our friendship and about those days. It was very hard for me, but I did my best and I think I was able to help him a little by preserving her memory. In those days, I blamed myself for not helping him more, but I don't know how I could have helped him more. I listened to him in his darkest hour and maybe that was some kind of comfort to him."
Despite his grief, Otto Frank was able to find a new purpose in his life. "He told me that he wanted to publish Anne's diary, and I didn't understand why," recalls Van Maarsen. "I didn't think anyone would be interested in reading a book like that. This was right after the war and people wanted to forget. And secondly, I didn't think that the stories of a young girl would interest anyone. Those were my first thoughts, and even after the book started to arouse interest around the world in the 1950s, I didn't want to be too involved. People were popping up, saying that they knew Anne and went to school with Anne, and it angered me. I didn't want to become famous because of a girl I knew who died in such circumstances. I didn't want to spend my life as 'Anne Frank's best friend' and, therefore, for years, I didn't talk about it at all."
Otto Frank gave her a copy of the diary in 1947, the first edition, with a dedication from him. "It was very strange to read it for the first time and I felt very uncomfortable," she says. "I knew that she didn't want me or any of her girlfriends to read the diary and I didn't feel right. It was weird to read about myself, especially when I knew that she was no longer alive."
The book, in which she is called Jopie, is still in her possession. Next to it is a framed copy of two letters that Anne wrote to Jacqueline and never sent. The two letters were written on September 25, 1942.
"I hope we will meet again soon," wrote Anne in the first letter, "but it won't be before the end of the war ... Be good, Jackie. Be well, I hope to receive a sign of life from you very soon and we will meet again.
Your best friend
Anne
P.S. I hope that by the time we meet I will always be your best friend.
Bye"
Anne concluded the second letter with the words: "We are not bored. We have company. That is all I'm allowed to tell about our life. It's scary but interesting, too. I'm not allowed to say more. See you, and a little kiss from Anne."
"This was a very sad and poignant moment," says Van Maarsen. "I thought about how lonely she must have been there and I regretted that I hadn't given her a picture when she asked for one. Anne had a lot of pictures, and I didn't have many, and so I thought there was no need for it, because we saw each other every day anyhow, but after I read the diary I felt terribly guilty and I was sorry that I was unable to at least write to her. Four weeks before Otto's death, he showed me the letter in her handwriting and, again, the sadness was hard to bear."
Not a Jew, not a Catholic
From the 1950s on, Anne Frank became the most widely known victim of the Holocaust. Initially, Otto Frank had trouble finding a publisher. Only after the play was staged on Broadway and a film was made on the basis of the diary, did the girl who had been Van Maarsen's best friend become an international phenomenon. The book sold over 25 million copies, and Anne Frank became a symbol.
Among Dutch Jewry, there is some discomfort over the special status of Anne Frank. Many feel that there has been too much focus on this one girl.
Van Maarsen: "I have Jewish friends and I don't talk with them about Anne, because they feel that all the attention is directed at her, while they lost all or most of their families. So many Jewish children died in the Holocaust and were forgotten, while she is so well known, they say. I don't argue with them, but I can tell you what I feel about Anne. People love her and the book, and the memory of the Holocaust is spread thanks to her. Thanks to Anne, I can write about my cousins, for instance."
Since 1986, Van Maarsen has been giving lectures all over the world about Anne Frank and her legacy, but it wasn't until 1990 that she was publicly revealed as "Jopie" of the diary (In the newer editions, she is referred to by her real name.) Afterward, she wrote the book, "My Name is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank: The Memoirs of Anne Frank's Best Friend,"(Arcadia Books) in which she described their relationship. This year, a new edition of the book was published in English and a new book by Van Maarsen, "Anne Frank's Heritage," will be published next year. She is no longer the timid girl that Anne adopted on her way home, nor is she the naive girl she once was. For one thing, she is outraged by the excessive use of the famous line Anne wrote in her diary, about her belief in people's inherent goodness, in spite of everything. This sentence is often chosen as the final line of documentary programs, plays and films about the Holocaust, emptying them of meaning, she thinks.
"I don't think Anne would have written such a line had she lived," says Van Maarsen. "She wrote this sentence when she was still in hiding, before she experienced the horrors. I am certain she would not have written such a sentence after Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. I thought the same thing then. I believed that everybody was nice except for the Germans, and that all people were good in their hearts, but since then, I've changed my mind, of course. People's attempts to profit from Anne's memory infuriate me. I don't understand how people can behave this way."
Van Maarsen married Rudy Sanders, a Dutch Jew who survived thanks to a Dutch family that adopted him during the years of persecution (both of his parents also survived, after hiding in various places in Holland throughout the war). They had three children, and over the years she worked as an artistic bookbinder. Her father was the sole survivor of his family after the war, and her mother chose to maintain a distance from the Jewish community.
Even though she is married to a Jew and she loves Israel, Jacqueline Van Maarsen does not feel herself to be Jewish. "After the war, I didn't want to be a Jew anymore," she says. "I suffered a lot because of my Jewishness, though not like most of the Jews of Holland, and I thought - I don't want to be Jew, and I also don't want to be a Catholic. I know that for the Jews, I'm not considered Jewish, and I'm not really a Catholic, but it really doesn't matter to me anymore. I am who I am. I saw the discrimination against the Jews and I felt it, but I can't say that I'm a Jew."W
By Shaul Adar
Amsterdam - The year was 1938, and the portents were clear. German Jewry had been subjected to persecution since the Nazis' rise to power five years earlier, and Hitler's expansionist ambitions were no secret. The danger of war hovered over Europe, but Hyman Van Maarsen - a Jewish book dealer from Amsterdam who was married to Eline, a French Catholic who had undergone a very liberal conversion in Paris - had made up his mind. After years in which the Jewish community had not recognized his wife's conversion, and even though he was secular, he managed to register her as a member of the city's large Jewish community. From that moment on, the family, including the two daughters, was considered Jewish, with all the ramifications that entailed.
Two years later, the Germans occupied Holland and Van Maarsen's achievement became a risk factor. Restrictions were imposed on the Jews: They were barred from entering parks, cinemas, swimming pools and many other public places. They were required to wear yellow patches and children in public schools were forced to transfer to Jewish schools.
In October 1941, Jacqueline Van Maarsen, then 12, returned from her first day at the Jewish school to her home in south Amsterdam. A new classmate joined her, riding on a bike. "My name is Anne," she introduced herself. "Anne Frank."
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It was the start of a close friendship that lasted nine months, until it was interrupted when the Frank family went into hiding on July 6, 1942. The two girls became best friends, in Anne Frank's words, and spent many hours together nearly every day. "Today it's obvious that my father's move was a mistake that endangered our lives," says Jacqueline Van Maarsen, now 89, in her apartment in south Amsterdam. "Holland was neutral in the First World War and he believed, like many other people, that we wouldn't get involved this time, either. But it would have been better if he hadn't registered us as a Jewish family. Still, it was because of this that I got to meet Anne. That was the only positive thing to come out of it."
Van Maarsen lays out on the table the Monopoly board, illustrated with the streets of Amsterdam, that she and Anne once played with; the children's book she received from her as a gift for her 13th birthday; a New Year's Day postcard Anne sent her; and Jacqueline's school yearbook.
"This girl died in the war," says Van Maarsen as she pages through the yearbook. "This one survived." The number of victims exceeds the number of survivors, and in the center of the book there is a dedication with a small picture of Anne Frank:
Amsterdam, 23 March 1942Dearest Jackie,
Always be a ray of light
And a good student, too
And then, you, my friend
I shall always remember
Remember your dear friend
Anne Frank
Margot's bra
A constant menace hung over the school on the banks of the Amstel River. The number of students and teachers steadily dwindled. Some left to go into hiding, but most were arrested by the police and the Gestapo and transferred to the Westerbrook transit camp in northern Holland. From there they were usually sent to their deaths in Germany or Poland. In one class, only three out of the 50 pupils who began the year were around to take final exams in April 1943, and by the end of the year, only one female pupil remained.
"It was a difficult time, but in a strange way we loved the Jewish school," says Van Maarsen. "Yes, we suddenly felt singled out and we had to leave our regular school, but I had good friends in the school, including Anne, and the teachers and pupils had a sense of shared fate."
It was a strange friendship. Anne was an outgoing girl - attention-seeking, nervy and flirtatious. Jacqueline was shy and quiet. "When she chose me as her friend, I was very surprised," says Van Maarsen. "Maybe she liked my black hair and blue eyes. We were two opposites. She talked all the time, and I didn't talk very much. She excelled at doing her homework and I didn't. I liked geography and history and she thought you could just read the facts in books, and didn't understand why we had to study these subjects. I was a lot better in math and I helped her. We complemented one another."
Van Maarsen says she didn't discern anything special in Anne. "She was funny and a good friend but also annoying at times, the kind of girl who always says what she wants to say even if it's not always nice. We spent a lot of time together - playing, strolling around town, going to the places we were still able to visit, like the ice cream store. She didn't write much in those days. I think that her writing talent only developed from the time she started writing the diary. I can't say that I saw something special in Anne, but she saw something special in herself."
One of the most famous girls of the 20th century, if not the most famous, Anne was intelligent and had a tremendous appetite for life, according to Van Maarsen. "Anne always needed to have people around her," she says. "She really enjoyed life. She organized parties and screenings of films at her house, and games. I never met anyone who enjoyed life as much as she did, but it wasn't always easy being around her. She was possessive and reacted with jealousy if I got close to other girls. In her diary she wrote that I got close to a girl named Ilsa, and became childish and condescending. I thought there was tension between Anne and this girl, who was very pretty, with curls, but then Anne added a few lines later on where she wrote that I was sweet again and that she was sorry for what she wrote before. At the time, I didn't notice all these details in the life of a group of girls. I just lived my little life and didn't care, but sometimes her jealousy was hard for me to deal with."
Those weren't the only difficulties. Anne wrote about in her diary: "I proposed to Jackie that we touch one another's breasts as proof of our friendship. Jackie refused."
Says Van Maarsen: "She wasn't pleased with my refusal and was only satisfied when I let her kiss me on the cheek. I prefer to think that she was just curious. She was flat-chested and filled the bra of Margot, her big sister, with cotton. I didn't need that. Some people think that it went beyond curiosity, but I don't know. It was embarrassing then, too, and I thought that I had to get away from her a little, and she got sad and angry, but I felt a need to set boundaries. She was demanding and this was an opportunity to tell her not to go so far."
Was there competition over who was Anne's best friend?
"Then, there wasn't any competition like that. But today there is. To me, there was no competition, but just a group of girls with Anne at the center - although not always in the way she described in her diary. She said that all the boys fell in love with her, but I didn't notice that. Years later, I met a woman who told me that her father had been in our class and that Anne noted in her diary that he was in love with her, but she found him unbearable. I asked the woman what her father thought of this; she replied that her father said he was never in love with Anne. Anne wrote about a guy named Helo who was also in love with her, but he said he thought Anne was nice and interesting, but Margot was the one he was really in love with."
No farewell letter
Life got harder and harder, but the girls were relatively protected. Their parents tried to shield them from rumors about the fate of the Jews in occupied Europe, and they were able to maintain an almost normal lifestyle, despite the growing restrictions. "I don't dare do anything because I'm always afraid that it's forbidden," Anne quotes Jackie in her diary. "We played ping-pong with other girls," says Van Maarsen. "I remember the books we read together that influenced her, I remember the games of Monopoly, the homework we did together. She was always very diligent. I remember that we cut out pictures of movie stars that she took with her. I remember sitting on the roof and all the chats we had."
On June 12, 1942, Anne celebrated her 13th birthday with a party at her home. A few days before that, she went with her father to a nearby shop and picked out her gift: a diary with a checkered cover. The shop on Rooseveltlaan is still in business at the same location and is included in the guided tours 'in the footsteps of Anne Frank' that pass by every so often. It was Anne's last birthday at home. Less than a month later, Van Maarsen came to the apartment one day and found it empty. Most of the household objects remained there; the bed was unmade, and one of Anne's favorite pairs of shoes had also been left behind. On the door was a note saying the family had moved to Switzerland.
Van Maarsen: "I was surprised, because we had promised one another to write farewell letters, and I thought there would be such a letter in the house, but I didn't find it. I also searched for the diary. I wanted to see what she wrote about us. But, more than anything, I was surprised and thought there must be a good reason why she didn't say goodbye to me. Had the situation been reversed, I think Anne would have been mad at me for disappearing without saying goodbye to her, but I just accepted it. I wanted to take some of Anne's things from the apartment, but it was dangerous."
The four members of the Frank family, together with another four Jews from Amsterdam, had entered a hiding place in the apartment above the office housing the business run by Otto Frank, Anne's father. There, Anne lived and wrote in her diary until the Dutch police, under Austrian command, raided the hideout. That was on August 4, 1944. The eight Jews were transferred to Gestapo headquarters in the south of the city and from there to the Westerbrook camp in the north of the country. A month later, on September 3, 1944, the last transport of Jews left Westerbrook for Auschwitz. All eight were on board. Only one of them, Otto Frank, returned to Amsterdam after the war. The other seven perished at different camps in Europe. Anne and her older sister, Margot, died of hunger and typhus at Bergen-Belsen about three weeks before the British army liberated the camp.
After the raid, books and other possessions of the eight Jews were left scattered on the floor of the hideout. Miep Gies, a family friend who had looked after the needs of the Jews while they were in hiding, picked up Anne's diary and hid it away in a drawer for safekeeping until the girl returned to Amsterdam. Gies did not read the personal diary; she asserted that if she had read it, she would have destroyed it, because of the information it contained about Dutch civilians who assisted the group in hiding - information that could have put their lives at risk. Gies kept the diary for eight months before she was able to return it to Otto Frank. And then Anne's wish to become a famous writer came true.
No one spoke about it
In the winter of 1942, raids by the Gestapo and police increased; young Jews were apprehended and sent to labor camps in Germany. Eline Van Maarsen realized that she had to do something before her family was harmed. The elegant Frenchwoman, who managed the dress department of the city's largest department store, put on her fanciest dress, carefully applied her makeup and boarded the tram for Euterpestraat, site of Gestapo headquarters. (Even today, with the building restored to its original use as a school and the street name changed to Gerrit van der Veenstraat, there is still something menacing about the fortress-like structure. Only a few hundred meters separate it from Jacqueline Van Maarsen's present home. Almost every day, she passes by the place where the fate of so many of her fellow Jews was sealed, while her family was fortunate enough to survive.)
Eline Van Maarsen asked to see the police commander and spoke with him in French. She explained that her husband had registered her and her daughters as Jews without her knowledge or consent. The commander was impressed by her and asked to see documents proving that she was not Jewish. When these arrived - with the help of a relative who ran a restaurant on the Champs-Elysees that was a favorite of high-ranking Nazis in Paris - the status of the females in the family was altered. The yellow patch was removed from their clothing, and Jacqueline and her sister Christine went back to being Catholics and ordinary Dutch citizens.
"My mother made us swear not to tell our father about this until it was official. She knew that he would object, but she was determined to do whatever was necessary in order to save us," says Van Maarsen. "It was a dangerous thing to do. There were people who entered Gestapo headquarters with a similar request and ended up being tortured. It wasn't a place where you wanted to proclaim your connection with Jews. This was a radical change in our lives, but I understood exactly why she made this move. Afterward, too, my father was upset, and my mother forbade me and my sister to talk about it. It created tension at home, but it saved my life and his life." All of Hyman Van Maarsen's relatives were sent to Sobibor, where they were killed in the gas chambers.
"I didn't feel guilty," says his daughter. "There was a sense of relief and concern for friends and family. Not for Anne. I thought she was safe in Switzerland. In the winter of 1944, when there was terrible starvation in Holland and thousands of people were dying of hunger and we were forced to survive on tulip bulbs, I remember that I was jealous of her, because I thought she was living comfortably in Switzerland."
Van Maarsen transferred back to a regular school. "At home we never spoke about a Jewish identity," she says. "The first time I encountered anti-Semitism was when I put on the yellow patch. My big disappointment with the behavior of the Dutch during the war was at the regular school that I transferred to. No one spoke about the Jews, and I was too shy to talk about what was happening to the Jews. My relatives were disappearing one after the other, but I couldn't talk about it in school. There was general indifference."
A little kiss from Anne
In May 1945, Holland was liberated. That summer, Otto Frank returned and went to the home of Miep Gies. He knew that his wife, Edith, was dead, but he still hoped and prayed that his daughters had survived. He met Van Maarsen, who learned then for the first time about the secret annex and the family's deportation to the camps, and they met again a few weeks later. In the meantime, Frank found out that his daughters had died at Bergen-Belsen - sick, bald and with nothing but parasite-infested blankets. The bereaved father wanted to hear again and again about the friendship between the two girls, about the days when Anne was a child like any other and loved her life.
Van Maarsen: "In those months, he came to our house over and over again and cried all the time. It seemed strange to me at the time, because I looked up to him as an adult, and I didn't want to think about the war. It was hard to cope with it all. My friend was dead, and I felt great sorrow for him and for others. My father's entire family died in the Holocaust. My two cousins, who were my age and whom I played with and was close to, were murdered in Sobibor. Otto wanted to talk with me every time about Anne and about our friendship and about those days. It was very hard for me, but I did my best and I think I was able to help him a little by preserving her memory. In those days, I blamed myself for not helping him more, but I don't know how I could have helped him more. I listened to him in his darkest hour and maybe that was some kind of comfort to him."
Despite his grief, Otto Frank was able to find a new purpose in his life. "He told me that he wanted to publish Anne's diary, and I didn't understand why," recalls Van Maarsen. "I didn't think anyone would be interested in reading a book like that. This was right after the war and people wanted to forget. And secondly, I didn't think that the stories of a young girl would interest anyone. Those were my first thoughts, and even after the book started to arouse interest around the world in the 1950s, I didn't want to be too involved. People were popping up, saying that they knew Anne and went to school with Anne, and it angered me. I didn't want to become famous because of a girl I knew who died in such circumstances. I didn't want to spend my life as 'Anne Frank's best friend' and, therefore, for years, I didn't talk about it at all."
Otto Frank gave her a copy of the diary in 1947, the first edition, with a dedication from him. "It was very strange to read it for the first time and I felt very uncomfortable," she says. "I knew that she didn't want me or any of her girlfriends to read the diary and I didn't feel right. It was weird to read about myself, especially when I knew that she was no longer alive."
The book, in which she is called Jopie, is still in her possession. Next to it is a framed copy of two letters that Anne wrote to Jacqueline and never sent. The two letters were written on September 25, 1942.
"I hope we will meet again soon," wrote Anne in the first letter, "but it won't be before the end of the war ... Be good, Jackie. Be well, I hope to receive a sign of life from you very soon and we will meet again.
Your best friend
Anne
P.S. I hope that by the time we meet I will always be your best friend.
Bye"
Anne concluded the second letter with the words: "We are not bored. We have company. That is all I'm allowed to tell about our life. It's scary but interesting, too. I'm not allowed to say more. See you, and a little kiss from Anne."
"This was a very sad and poignant moment," says Van Maarsen. "I thought about how lonely she must have been there and I regretted that I hadn't given her a picture when she asked for one. Anne had a lot of pictures, and I didn't have many, and so I thought there was no need for it, because we saw each other every day anyhow, but after I read the diary I felt terribly guilty and I was sorry that I was unable to at least write to her. Four weeks before Otto's death, he showed me the letter in her handwriting and, again, the sadness was hard to bear."
Not a Jew, not a Catholic
From the 1950s on, Anne Frank became the most widely known victim of the Holocaust. Initially, Otto Frank had trouble finding a publisher. Only after the play was staged on Broadway and a film was made on the basis of the diary, did the girl who had been Van Maarsen's best friend become an international phenomenon. The book sold over 25 million copies, and Anne Frank became a symbol.
Among Dutch Jewry, there is some discomfort over the special status of Anne Frank. Many feel that there has been too much focus on this one girl.
Van Maarsen: "I have Jewish friends and I don't talk with them about Anne, because they feel that all the attention is directed at her, while they lost all or most of their families. So many Jewish children died in the Holocaust and were forgotten, while she is so well known, they say. I don't argue with them, but I can tell you what I feel about Anne. People love her and the book, and the memory of the Holocaust is spread thanks to her. Thanks to Anne, I can write about my cousins, for instance."
Since 1986, Van Maarsen has been giving lectures all over the world about Anne Frank and her legacy, but it wasn't until 1990 that she was publicly revealed as "Jopie" of the diary (In the newer editions, she is referred to by her real name.) Afterward, she wrote the book, "My Name is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank: The Memoirs of Anne Frank's Best Friend,"(Arcadia Books) in which she described their relationship. This year, a new edition of the book was published in English and a new book by Van Maarsen, "Anne Frank's Heritage," will be published next year. She is no longer the timid girl that Anne adopted on her way home, nor is she the naive girl she once was. For one thing, she is outraged by the excessive use of the famous line Anne wrote in her diary, about her belief in people's inherent goodness, in spite of everything. This sentence is often chosen as the final line of documentary programs, plays and films about the Holocaust, emptying them of meaning, she thinks.
"I don't think Anne would have written such a line had she lived," says Van Maarsen. "She wrote this sentence when she was still in hiding, before she experienced the horrors. I am certain she would not have written such a sentence after Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. I thought the same thing then. I believed that everybody was nice except for the Germans, and that all people were good in their hearts, but since then, I've changed my mind, of course. People's attempts to profit from Anne's memory infuriate me. I don't understand how people can behave this way."
Van Maarsen married Rudy Sanders, a Dutch Jew who survived thanks to a Dutch family that adopted him during the years of persecution (both of his parents also survived, after hiding in various places in Holland throughout the war). They had three children, and over the years she worked as an artistic bookbinder. Her father was the sole survivor of his family after the war, and her mother chose to maintain a distance from the Jewish community.
Even though she is married to a Jew and she loves Israel, Jacqueline Van Maarsen does not feel herself to be Jewish. "After the war, I didn't want to be a Jew anymore," she says. "I suffered a lot because of my Jewishness, though not like most of the Jews of Holland, and I thought - I don't want to be Jew, and I also don't want to be a Catholic. I know that for the Jews, I'm not considered Jewish, and I'm not really a Catholic, but it really doesn't matter to me anymore. I am who I am. I saw the discrimination against the Jews and I felt it, but I can't say that I'm a Jew."W
Commentary
While I have read much as I could on Anne Frank, in my early years of trying to understand the Jewish Holocaust, of course Jacqueline van Maarsen name would appear and one thing I have always wished to know is what happened to Jacqueline after the Holocaust; I had heard many things, but one knows how that goes.
I am grateful, to be able to know more about her.
Because of my studies, I had hoped to meet Jacqueline van Maarsen, one day and be able to talk with her. Not so much about Anne, but about Jacqueline’s life with the hope it is a good and happy one now.
Labels: History, Jewish Holocaust
posted by HRM Deborah of Israel and the Messenger of Peace at 5:32 PM
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