Sequel to Anne Frank Story Told by Camp Survivors

AMSTERDAM — Seven Jewish women who knew Anne Frank during the final months of her life in Nazi concentration camps have broken their silence after 43 years and told the sequel to her famous wartime diary in a television documentary.

Middle of Winter

“In the last days, at a certain moment Anne stood before me wrapped in a blanket . . . and told me that she was so terrified of the bugs in her clothes she had thrown her clothes away,” recalled Janny Brandeis in the program broadcast on Tuesday.

“It was the middle of winter. I scraped together what I could find for her,” Brandeis said, recounting their time at Bergen-Belsen camp in northwest Germany.

Symbol of Persecution

“A few days later I went to see her and Margot (Anne’s sister) had fallen from the bed onto the stone floor, dead. A day later Anne died,” she said in the documentary by the Dutch television broadcast company TROS.

The documentary provided the first eyewitness accounts of Anne Frank’s days after her arrest, along with her family, on Aug. 4, 1944, in the annex of an Amsterdam canal house where they had hidden from the German occupying forces for two years.

Anne’s diary of life in hiding has become a symbol of Nazi persecution of Jews but ends with her arrest, nine months before she died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945.

Many Interviews

The family’s sole survivor, Anne’s father Otto, had been separated from his wife and children in Auschwitz camp in occupied Poland and did not hear about their fate until after World War II.

The documentary, a Dutch-Belgian co-production, included an interview with Anne childhood friend Lies Goosens, who now lives under another name in Israel.

Goosens recalled being told by the Franks’ neighbor that the family had fled to Switzerland and only discovered the truth when she met Anne again in Bergen-Belsen at the barbed wire fence between two sections of the camp.

“We cried out when we saw each other. . . . ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked her. ‘I thought you were in Switzerland.’ She laughed and told me the neighbor had said that to conceal their going into hiding,” Goosens recalled.

Goosens said she tried to toss Anne a biscuit from her slightly less dismal part of the camp. “But a scream arose and other women fell on it--they were also hungry--and grabbed it away,” she recalled.

On another occasion, the last on which she saw Anne, Goosens said she managed to slip her some food and clothing.

Another survivor recalled working with Anne at a Nazi labor camp in the Netherlands, where they took batteries apart so the Germans could recycle the parts.

Several of the women were later transported to Auschwitz where they recounted the Franks maintained their dignity through little things like keeping track of the date and not swearing.

Dutch film maker Willy Lindwer took two years to make the film. He traced several eyewitnesses after searching for months. It took him more than a year to persuade them to talk.

“They participated in the film because they realized that they were among the very few eyewitnesses left. After this film they don’t want to talk any more,” he said.