People Associated With Anne Frank - Friends and Extended Family

Friends and Extended Family

• Hannah Goslar - Known to her childhood friends as "Hanneli" or "Lies", Hannah was Anne's oldest friend, along with Sanne Ledermann. While Hannah was in Bergen-Belsen, she met Auguste van Pels by asking through a hay-filled barbed wire fence if anyone who could hear her voice spoke Dutch. Auguste van Pels answered her and remembered Hannah from peacetime in Amsterdam. Mrs. van Pels then told her that Anne was a prisoner in the section of the camp she, herself was in. Hannah was astonished, as she, like most people back in Amsterdam, believed the Franks had escaped to Switzerland. Hannah was able to talk to Anne several times through the barrier, and to toss some essentials over it for her. Anne had told Hannah, at this point, that she believed both of her parents were dead, and in later years Hannah reflected that if Anne had known her father were still alive, she might have found the strength to survive until the camp was liberated. Shortly after Hannah threw the bundle over the fence for Anne, Anne's contingent of prisoners was moved, and Hannah never heard from her again. Hannah and her little sister Gabi were the only members of their family to survive the war, and Hannah was near death from typhus and tuberculosis when the Russians liberated the train in which she and Gabi were being transported, reportedly to Theresienstadt. After recovering, Hannah emigrated to Israel, became a nurse, and ultimately a grandmother of ten. (Müller, Melissa: Anne Frank The Biography p. 282).

• Susanne ''Sanne'' Ledermann was Anne's constant companion from the time of her arrival in Amsterdam, and is mentioned several times at the beginning of the diary. She was considered the "quiet" one of the trio of "Anne, Hanne and Sanne". She was very intelligent, and according to Anne, very facile with poetry. Sanne's full first name is variously listed in different sources as both "Susanne" and "Susanna". Only her friends called her "Sanne", her family used the more Germanic "Susi". After his return to Amsterdam, Otto Frank learned that Sanne and her parents, Franz and Ilse, were arrested on 20 June 1943. Sanne and her parents were sent first to Westerbork, then on 16 November to Auschwitz, where all three were gassed upon arrival. Sanne's sister Barbara Ledermann, who was a friend of Margot, had, through contacts in the Dutch Underground, acquired an Aryan ID card (becoming "Barbara Waarts") and worked as a courier for the Underground. She survived the war and later married the Nobel prize winning biochemist Martin Rodbell, as noted in the biography of Rodbell on Wikipedia.

• Jacqueline van Maarsen "Jacque", as she was known to everyone, was Anne's "best" friend at the time the Frank family went into hiding. Jacque sincerely liked Anne, but found her at times too demanding in her friendship. Anne, in her diary later, was remorseful for her own attitude toward Jacque, regarding with better understanding Jacque's desire to have other close girlfriends as well - "I just want to apologize and explain things", Anne wrote. After two and a half months in hiding, Anne composed a farewell letter to Jacque in her diary, vowing her lifelong friendship. Jacque read this passage much later, after the publication of the diary. Jacque's French-born mother was a Christian, and that, along with several other extenuating circumstances, combined to get the "J" (for "Jew") removed from the family's identification cards. The van Maarsens were thus able to live out the war years in Amsterdam. Jacque later married her childhood sweetheart Ruud Sanders, and still lives in Amsterdam, where she is an award-winning bookbinder and has written four books on their notable friendship: Anne and Jopie (1990), My Friend, Anne Frank (1996), My Name Is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank (2003), and Inheriting Anne Frank (2009).

• Nanette "Nanny" Blitz was another schoolmate of Anne's. Nannette, by her own admission, was the girl given the made-up initials "G. S." in the early pages of Anne's diary. While they were not always on the best of terms during school days (their personalities were much too similar), Nanny had been invited to Anne's 13th birthday party, and when they met in Bergen-Belsen, their reunion was enthusiastic. With prisoners constantly being shifted around in the huge camp, Nanny later lost track of Anne. Nannette was the only member of her family to survive the war. While she was recovering from tuberculosis in a hospital immediately after the war, Otto Frank got in touch with her and she was able to write and give him some information about Anne and Margot's final weeks. Nanny and her family, as of 1998, resided in São Paulo, Brazil. (Müller, p. 269).

• Ilse Wagner, whom Jacque van Maarsen called "a sweet and sensible girl", is mentioned several times in the early part of the diary. Her family had a table tennis set, and Anne and Margot frequently went to their house to play. Wagner was the first of Anne's circle of friends to be deported. Along with her mother and grandmother, she was sent to Westerbork in January 1943, then to Sobibór extermination camp, where all three were gassed upon arrival on 2 April 1943. (Müller, p. 301).

• Lutz Peter Schiff: For all the admiring boys Anne was surrounded with during her school days, she said repeatedly in her diary that the only one she deeply cared about was Peter Schiff, whom she called "Petel". He was three years older than Anne and they had, according to Anne, been "inseparable" during the summer of 1940, when Anne turned 11. Then, Peter changed addresses and a new acquaintance slightly older than Peter convinced him Anne was "just a child". Anne had several vivid dreams of Peter while in hiding, writing about them in her diary, and realized herself that she saw Peter van Pels, at least partially, as a surrogate for Peter Schiff. Anne implies in her diary (12 January 1944) that Peter Schiff gave her a pendant as a gift, which she cherished from then on. Peter was also a prisoner at Bergen-Belsen, though he was transported from there to Auschwitz before Anne and Margot arrived at Belsen. It is known for certain that he died in Auschwitz, although the exact date of his death is unclear. In 2009, the Anne Frank House received a photograph of Peter Schiff as a boy, donated by one of his former classmates, and it can be seen, along with the story of its donation, on the Anne Frank House website.

• Helmuth "Hello" Silberberg was the boy Anne was closest to at the time her family went into hiding, though they had only known each other about two weeks at that time. His grandfather, who disliked the name Helmuth, dubbed him "Hello". He was 16, and adored Anne, but she wrote in her diary that she was "not in love with Hello, he is just a friend, or as mummy would say, one of my 'beaux'", though Anne also remarked in her diary about how much she enjoyed Hello's company. Hello had been living in Amsterdam with his grandparents, but by a very convoluted series of events, including several narrow escapes from the Nazis, he was able eventually to reunite with his parents in Belgium. Belgium was also an occupied country, however, and he and his family were still "in hiding", though not under circumstances as difficult as the Franks. The town where the Silberbergs were hiding was liberated by American forces on 3 September 1944, and Hello was free — tragically on the same day that Anne and her family left on the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz. Hello emigrated to the United States after the war, and is today known as Ed Silverberg. He appears as Ed Silverberg in the multimedia stage presentation about the Holocaust called, And Then They Came for Me.

• Eva Geiringer shared a remarkably similar history with Anne. The Geiringers lived on the opposite side of Merwedeplein, the square where the Frank's apartment was located, and Eva and Anne were almost exactly the same age. Eva was also a close friend of Sanne Ledermann, and she knew both Anne and Margot. Eva described herself as an out-and-out tomboy, and hence she was in awe of Anne's fashion sense and worldliness, but she was somewhat puzzled by Anne's fascination with boys. "I had a brother, so boys were no big thing to me", Eva wrote. But Anne had introduced Eva to her father when the Geiringers first came to Amsterdam "so you can speak German with someone" as Anne had said, and Eva never forgot Otto's kindness to her. Though they did know each other on a first-name basis, Eva and Anne were not especially close, as they had different groups of friends aside from their mutual close friendship with Sanne Ledermann. Eva's brother Heinz was called up for deportation to labor camp on the same day as Margot Frank, and the Geiringers went into hiding at the same time the Franks did, though the Geiringer family split into two groups to do so - Eva and her mother in one location, and Heinz and his father at another. Though hiding in two separate locations, all four of the Geiringers were betrayed on the same day, about three months before the Frank family. Eva survived Auschwitz, and when the Russians liberated Birkenau, the women's sector of the camp, she walked the mile-and-a-half distance to the men's camp to look for her father and brother, finding out much later that they had not survived the prisoner march out of Auschwitz. But when she entered the sick barracks of the men's camp, she recognized Otto Frank, and had a warm reunion with him. Eight years later, Otto married Eva's widowed mother Fritzi, thereby making Eva a stepsister of Anne. Eva later wrote her autobiography Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale by the Stepsister of Anne Frank, which served as the inspiration for the development of a popular multimedia stage presentation about the Holocaust called And Then They Came for Me. (Eva also co-authored, with Barbara Powers, an autobiography targeted to younger readers and considered a suitable companion book to Anne's diary, titled Promise, in which she describes her family's happy life before going into hiding, the experience of living in hiding during the Nazi occupation, of going to the concentration camps, and finally, of going after liberation to the house where Heinz and their father had hidden, to retrieve the paintings Heinz had hidden beneath the floorboards there. Heinz's paintings have been displayed in exhibitions in the United States and are now a part of a permanent exhibition in Amsterdam's war museum.)

• Mary Bos was a schoolmate from the Montessori school. She was an invited guest at Anne's tenth birthday party, and in the well-known photo of that gathering, she is the very slender girl third from the right (Lindwer, Willy: The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, plate and caption following p. 48). Mary was a gifted artist, whose drawings and paintings were much admired by her peers. She is mentioned in passing in Anne's diary, when Anne writes of dreaming about Peter Schiff. She and Peter are looking "at a book of drawings by Mary Bos". Mary and her parents had emigrated to the United States in February 1940. When they left, Anne wrote Mary a little poem as a goodbye note. Mary almost forgot about Anne, but after the war, when Anne's diary was published, she recalled about Anne, that they were friends at Montessori. After the war, Mary wed Bob Schneider. They still live in the United States.

• Käthe "Kitty" Egyedi: Kitty was another lifelong friend of Anne's, and was, like Mary Bos, a fine artist (Kitty also remained lifelong friends with Mary Bos, communicating regularly by letter, even after Mary moved permanently to the United States in 1940). Schoolmates at Montessori, Anne and Kitty attended different schools after sixth grade, and hence they had drifted apart somewhat. But shortly before the Franks went into hiding, Kitty visited Anne one day when Anne was in bed with a slight fever. They chatted the whole afternoon, and Kitty was impressed and pleased that the shrill, blunt, and boy-crazy friend she remembered from Montessori school had begun to mature into a somewhat more introspective and thoughtful girl. This drew them closer together again. In the picture of Anne's 10th birthday referenced above under "Mary Bos", Kitty is the girl in the center with the dark pleated skirt (Lindwer, as cited above). Kitty never felt that Anne was specifically thinking of her when she addressed her diary passages to "Kitty", and most Anne scholars and biographers agree, believing that Anne borrowed the name from Cissy van Marxveldt's Joop ter Heul books (these were a great favorite of Anne's, and Joop's best friend was a character named "Kitty Francken"). Kitty's entire family survived internment at Theresienstadt, and, following her father's profession, she became a dentist after the war. (Müller p. 290).

• Lucia "Lucie" van Dijk was a Christian friend from Montessori school. Lucie's mother was an adamant member of the NSB until the end of the war, but Lucie's disillusioned father left the party in 1942. Anne was shocked when the van Dijks became party members, but Otto Frank patiently explained to her that they could still be good people even if they had distasteful politics. Lucie herself was briefly a rather conflicted and nervous member of the "Jeugdstorm" (Nazi youth group) but between her father's later abandonment of the party, and her grandmother's absolute abhorrence of anything connected with National Socialism, Lucie dropped out of the Jeugdstorm in late 1942. She married after the war and has lived her whole life in Amsterdam. In the group picture of Anne's tenth birthday, Lucie is the girl on the extreme left (Lindwer, as cited above).

• Rie "Ietje" Swillens was another good friend of Anne's all the way through Montessori school. Ietje was the girl whom Anne breathlessly shared the news with concerning one of her maternal uncles, who had been arrested by the Nazis and sent to labor camp (he later was released and emigrated to the United States). Being Christian, Ietje's family was able to live out the war in Amsterdam. She became a teacher in later years and today lives in Amstelveen, outside of Amsterdam. She is the girl second from right in the "tenth birthday" picture (Lindwer, as cited above).

• Juultje Ketellaper and Martha van den Berg are two other childhood friends of Anne's who appear in the picture of Anne's tenth birthday party. Very little is known about either girl. Juultje, the very tall girl near the center, was gassed by the Nazis in Sobibór (Lindwer, as cited above). She may have been a Montessori schoolmate of Anne's, or merely a neighborhood friend. Martha, on the far right in the photograph, survived the war. Martha was a Montessori schoolmate, and is seen in another picture with Anne taken during Anne's last term at Montessori (Lindwer, as cited above).

• Hannelore "Hansi" Klein (Laureen Nussbaum) was exactly midway in age between Anne and Margot. Hansi was an exception among those who knew Anne - she was rather indifferent about Anne, idolizing Anne's sister Margot instead. But Anne, Hansi, and Hansi's two sisters performed in a holiday play about a vain princess who is punished with a long nose for her vanity, until she sees the error of her ways. Anne played the princess, and Hansi noted that she played the role to perfection, and had "natural charisma". Most people felt that Margot was the more beautiful of the Frank sisters, but Hansi observed that Anne, in her opinion, was prettier than Margot because "she was always smiling". Aside from those anecdotes, however, Hansi thought of Anne primarily as a noisy chatterbox, and "a shrimp", and she was surprised and impressed with Anne's inner depth upon reading the diary much later. Hansi married a young physician after the war and, upon emigrating to America, changed her first name to "Laureen", and ultimately became a professor of foreign literature and languages at Portland State University.

• Gertrud Naumann was a friend and companion of Anne and Margot in Germany. Although several years older than Margot, this friendly girl always played with both of the Frank sisters, and was a neighborhood favorite of both Mr. and Mrs. Frank. After the Franks moved to Amsterdam, Gertrud kept contact with them through letters. Being Christian, Gertrud and her family were able to avoid persecution in the war. Gertrud was one of the first friends in Germany with whom Otto Frank got in touch after the war. In 1949, Gertrud married Karl Trenz. Gertrud died in 2002 at the age of eighty-five.

• Bernhard (Bernd) "Buddy" Elias was a cousin of Anne's who lived in Switzerland, and a great favorite of hers. Four years older than Anne (and hence, even older than Margot) his rollicking sense of fun matched Anne's temperament perfectly, and he much preferred Anne as a playmate to the staid and proper Margot. Everyone called him "Buddy" except Anne, who always called him "Bernd". He was a very talented ice skater, which Anne hugely admired. She even wrote an imaginary movie plot in her diary, wherein she would skate with Bernd, including a sketch of the costume she would wear. After a long career as a professional skater and actor, he eventually became the head of the Anne Frank Fund in Basel (a separate organization from the Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam).(Müller, p. 270).

• Charlotta Kaletta, the common law wife of Fritz Pfeffer, was not Jewish and therefore was able to remain in her Amsterdam apartment during the occupation. Kaletta and Pfeffer had been regulars at the Sunday afternoon "coffees" hosted by the Franks before the war, and hence she knew the entire Frank family. Miep Gies was especially touched by the devotion Pfeffer and Kaletta displayed to each other, and frequently passed letters from one to the other, an act which the other members of the household viewed as imprudent, but which she felt was important. Kaletta's Jewish husband and their son both died in Auschwitz, but she held hope for some time after the war's end that Pfeffer had survived. When she learned of his death, she married him posthumously, Otto Frank making the arrangements for her. Frank was always sympathetic to her and continued to offer her assistance, but in the mid-1950s she severed all contact with him and with Miep and Jan Gies, because she was offended by the unflattering depiction of Pfeffer in Anne's diary. Charlotta died in Amsterdam on 13 June 1985.

• Several members of the Frank and Holländer families fled Germany, including Otto's mother and sister and Edith's two brothers. Otto's family members emigrated from Germany to Switzerland. Edith's two brothers fled to the United States. All of them survived the war. In his later years, Otto Frank lamented his decision to take his own family to the Netherlands.