Willy Lindwer - The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 1992

Copyright 1988 by Willy Lindwer English translation copyright 1991 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1991. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

Originally published in the Netherlands as De Laatste Zeven Maanden: Vrouwen in Het Spoor Van Anne Frank by Gooi & Sticht in 1988.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lindwer, Willy.
[Laatste zeven maanden. English]
The last seven months of Anne Frank / Willy Lindwer; translated from Dutch by Alison Meersschaert.ist Anchor Books ed.
p. cm.
Translation of: De laatste zeven maanden.
Originally published: New York: Pantheon Books, C1991.
1. Frank, Anne,19291945. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (19391945)
NetherlandsPersonal narratives. 3. Holocaust survivors
NetherlandsInterviews. 4. NetherlandsEthnic relations.
I. Title.
[DS135.N6F734513 1992]
940.5318092dc20

[B] 92-5407

eISBN: 978-0-307-78078-2

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

With special gratitude to the women who
contributed in such a remarkable way to the creation
of the documentary film and this book .

For my grandmother Rivka, who was murdered in
Poland by the Nazis .

Contents

Preface

This book contains the complete interviews conducted for my film documentary The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank . The film was first televised in May 1988 in the Netherlands. Since then it has been shown in many other countries all over the world, including the United States in 1989. In the course of my work on the documentary, I found that only a small portion of each interview could be used in the film, although every interview contained material of sufficient importance to be preserved in its entirety. Thus this book not only supplements and rounds out the film, but it is, above all, a historical record of the admirable courage of the women who recount their dramatic experiences here.

The research and preparation for the film took more than two years, and many preliminary conversations were necessary before the interviews could be recorded. In recounting their experiences, the women underwent great emotional and psychological stress; yet the need to tell their stories prevailed.

Through the filmed interviews, an attempt is made to reconstruct a period during the Second World War. The six women all knew Anne Frank in the last seven months of her life, and although they tell of their own experiences, many aspects of their stories also reflect the story of Anne Frank.

I developed a special bond of friendship and trust with each of these women. My admiration for their enormous strength is difficult to express. Through this work I have come to better understand the burden that each of themand all who survived the horrors of the German concentration campsbears.

Although I belong to the postwar generation, I come from a Jewish family that suffered heavily during the war. Therefore the material was not unfamiliar to me. And yet, these interviews with survivors from Auschwitz made it clearer than ever to me what it meant to be deprived of ones freedom and to be subjected to the horrors of the German extermination camps.

Of those who participated in this project, I owe special thanks to A. H. Paape, Director of the Royal Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam and Rene Sanders, free-lance journalist and coworker on this project. I should also like to express my gratitude to Bob Bremer, program director at TROS television in the Netherlands, who helped the project along with his active interest and support.

I am grateful to Elfriede Frank and the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, for their sympathetic support. In particular I want to thank my wife, Hanna, who supported me at critically important moments and made substantial contributions to both the film and the book.

Amstelveen, July 12, 1988

Willy Lindwer

Introduction

Anne Frank has become the best known symbol for the murdered Jews of the Second World War. Her diary, which she wrote between June 12, 1942 and August 1, 1944, while she was in hiding in the Annex, was published in more than fifty countries. It has been the inspiration for many stage, screen, and television presentations.

The Annex itself is now a museum and has attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world.

It was inevitable that the picture which emerged from the diary would become romanticized by a large public, especially the generation born after the warmany of whom have read the adventures she began to record in her diary during one of the most tragic periods in our history. She was thirteen at the time, fifteen when she died.

On Tuesday, August 1, 1944, Anne wrote the last letter to her diary. On August 4 the SD (the German Security Service) raided the Annex at No. 263 Prinsengracht. All those who were in hiding there were arrested. Annes own writing ends here.

Arrest, deportation, and annihilation are the final unwritten chapters of Annes diary and of six million Jewish victims, of whom more than half were women and children. From the moment of arrest, Annes life-in-hiding in the Annex, the letters to her diary, the romantic and idealized notions of a young girl give way to the harsh, ruthless reality of the Nazi concentration camps, where unprecedented genocide was committed. Here Anne, her sister Margot, and their mother Edith met their deaths.

Over the years, relatively little attention has been paid to Annes life following her arrest and deportation. There was no extensive research, and in some cases the meager sources contradicted each other. Thus almost nothing was known about the final, fateful seven months of her life, or how she endured the bitter misery in Westerbork and Auschwitz-Birkenau. She died of disease, starvation, and exhaustion in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945a few weeks before the liberation.

More than forty years later, only a few people are left who are able and willing to tell about that time. The women who survived and whom I interviewed were unable at first to talk about their experiences. To this day, several still cant. Gradually some have found the wordsas the process of assimilating the Holocaust continues for them. Some feel a need for catharsis, others want to tell their stories for posterity. They know they are among the last eyewitnesses to these unreal and incomprehensible times in human history.

In the film, and in this book, women speakwomen who, like Anne, were in Westerbork, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Bergen-Belsen. They describe what happened on the transports and in the camps where Anne stayed.

The women knew Anne and her family. Several had even gone to school with her or were friends of hers. Because the interviews are complete, the book fills in the background and milieu of each of these women and, as a consequence, places them in the context of a much broader contemporary picture.

Some differences exist in the accounts and viewpoints of some of the details of Annes final seven months. Perhaps the exact historical facts are less important than a record of what Anne and these womenwho approached the limits of human endurancewent through.