Witnesses to the history of Anne Frank

Anne Frank’s diary and the letters she wrote to her family and friends before she went into hiding contain people and events about whom there are hardly any written sources and about whom little is known. There are also many gaps in our knowledge of the other people in hiding and their helpers. Thanks to the testimony of 18 people who knew these hitherto unknown figures in Anne Frank’s environment, our understanding of her social environment is enhanced.

Like the Frank family, a number of the witnesses interviewed in this oral history project came from Germany. Their children also went to the Montessori school, the Municipal Lyceum for Girls or the Jewish Lyceum and were in Anne and Margot’s class. One of the ‘witnesses’, a girl next door to the Frank family who lived at Merwedeplein at the time, tells her story about Anne. Another interviewee is a woman who was transported in the same train carriage as the Frank family from Westerbork to Auschwitz. In the camp she stayed with Anne, Edith, Margot and Augusta van Pels in the same barracks.