Yesterday, a group of friends held an unusual birthday celebration at an apartment in the Netherlands. The guest of honor wasn’t present, and the locale is now owned by a museum. The birthday girl was Anne Frank, whose family went into hiding from that very apartment 77 years ago.
Jacqueline van Maarsen and Albert Gomes de Mesquita attended Anne Frank’s 13th birthday party in 1942. It 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,” Van Maarsen says. She and Gomes de Mesquita met students from Amsterdam schools at an event to mark what would have been Anne’s 90th birthday.
It was on her 13th birthday that Anne received her first red checkered diary. She called it “maybe one of my nicest presents.” On Wednesday, a similar diary sat on a table along with other items she described receiving on her birthday—a blue blouse, cold cream, a book.
Just three weeks after the party, Anne and her family fled into hiding in the secret annex behind that house. Anne’s family hid for just over two years before being arrested and deported. In 1945, exhausted and suffering from typhus, Anne died in a Nazi concentration camp.
Like Anne, with whom he attended Amsterdam’s Jewish Lyceum, Gomes de Mesquita also went into hiding. Unlike the Franks, he moved around the country from one hiding place to another as he dodged arrest and deportation. “I think you have to learn things from what happens,” he says. “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 restored to look like it would have when the Franks lived there, students 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,” says 13-year-old Sietse Munting. He heard Van Maarsen say that she sometimes felt like she lost her identity because she was “Anne’s friend.”
“I really tried to think about that,” he says. “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.”
Anne’s father Otto was the only member of the Frank family to survive the war. He later published his daughter’s diaries. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl is one of the most important works of the 20th century.
(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 Anne Frank’s 90th birthday, in Amsterdam on Wednesday, June 12, 2019. AP Photo/Michael C. Corder)
