Anne Frank 90 party
On Anne Frank's 90th birthday, her friends meet students
Friends of Anne met with local school children and reminisced about eating cookies and watching movies for the young Nazi victim's 13th birthday in 1942
For Jacqueline van Maarsen, attending Anne Frank's 13th birthday party in 1942 was a welcome distraction from the grim reality of life in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during World War II.
Enjoying movies and cookies at Anne's apartment meant "we didn't think about it at that moment," the 90-year-old Van Maarsen said Wednesday as she and another of Anne's friends met students from Amsterdam schools at an event to mark what would have been Anne's 90th birthday.
Jacqueline van Maarsen, left, and Albert Gomes de Mesquita, school friends of Anne Frank, talk to students during an event to mark what would have been the famed Holocaust diarist's 90th birthday, in Amsterdam, June 12, 2019
Just three weeks later, Anne and her family fled into hiding in the secret annex behind a canal-side house that was made famous in her diary. Less than three years after that, exhausted and suffering from typhus, Anne died with her sister in the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in February 1945.
A table is decorated with replicas of gifts Anne Frank received for her 13th birthday - including her first diary - during an event at her family's former apartment in Amsterdam to mark what would have been the teenage Jewish diarist's 90th birthday June 12, 2019
They hid in the annex for just over two years before being arrested and deported to Nazi-run concentration camps. Anne's father Otto, the only member of the family to survive the war, later published her diaries. The book went on to be published in dozens of countries around the world and is regarded as one of the most important works of the 20th century.
It was on her 13th birthday that Anne received her first red checkered diary, calling it "maybe one of my nicest presents." A similar diary was laid on a table along with other gifts -- a blue blouse, cold cream, a book, that she described receiving on her birthday.
Albert Gomes de Mesquita and Jacqueline van Maarsen talk to students of the Anne Frank Montessori school on the famed Holocaust diarist's 90th birthday in her former home in Amsterdam, June 12, 2019
Asked what lessons he would pass on to the youth of today, he told students from the International School of Amsterdam: "I think you have to learn things from what happens. I've been helped by so many different people and they were Roman Catholic, Protestant, atheist, communist, rich, poor," he said.
"I've slept in 12 different places during hiding and my lesson is: Good people can be found everywhere."
Squeezed into the living room of the apartment, which has been painstakingly restored so that it looks like it would have when the Frank's lived there, the students listened intently and peppered Van Maarsen and Gomes de Mesquita with questions.
"It was really incredible to meet them, not only as Anne's friends but as survivors of the war," said 13-year-old Sietse Munting.
A photo of Anne Frank stands on a replica of the writing desk she once used in her family's former apartment in Amsterdam, during an event to mark what would have been her 90th birthday, in Amsterdam, June 12, 2019
"I really tried to think about that and tried to think; 'it's not only Anne,' he said. "Sure, we remember Anne because she's very important -- and we should remember her -- but there were also many, many others who also faced this time."
The apartment is now owned by the Anne Frank Museum, but unlike the secret annex is not open to the public. Fittingly, it is used by a Dutch literature fund to house writers who fear persecution in their own home countries. The current resident is a Kurdish poet and translator, Kawa Nemir, who just finished translating James Joyce's epic Ulysses into Kurdish.
Van Maarsen, who has written about her friendship with Anne, recalled their "very good and special friendship" that will always endure in her memory.
"I couldn't forget her because she got so famous," she said.
