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We All Wore Stars
Memories of Anne Frank from Her Classmates
By Theo Coster, Marjolijn de Jager Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2009 Theora Design and Uitgeverij Carrera, Amsterdam
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-230-34059-6
CHAPTER 1
part 1
A New School
(Age Thirteen)
in September 1941, the Germans issued a law stipulating that Jewish and gentile children in the Netherlands were no longer allowed to attend school together. Although I had already passed the entrance exam for a public high school, I now had to attend the Jewish lyceum.
The lyceum was located on the former Stadstimmertuin, a little street very close to the Carré Theater. This high school had an all-Jewish faculty and was attended only by Jewish children. Today, the building is used as a beauty and hairdressing school, but from the outside, it still looks almost entirely the same. A warped metal Star of David above the entrance and aglass commemorative plaque are the only reminders of its history.
The school was open for just a few years. At a certain point, there simply weren't enough teachers or students left for it to operate. I was one of the students who was forced to stop early on.
During the publication event for Absent, it had been gratifying to see the rather large number of former students still alive. Fifty percent of the students of the lyceum survived the war, while throughout the Netherlands, only about 20 percent of Jews survived. Nobody has been able to explain the difference with any certainty, and no systematic research has (yet) been done on the question. It is assumed that many of the teachers and students managed to survive by going into hiding, as they often had the ability to pay for it. Thanks to individual contacts with the city's Jewish Council, some had been granted deportation extensions as late as 1943. Class, money, and social networks may have also all played a role. Who knows how much I owe to my father's stamp collection, which he sold off piece by piece, or to my mother's jewelry, which she sold clandestinely somewhere along the line. To some extent, it helped to have wealth or connections and friends to draw on.
Attending the lyceum gave us a sense of belonging to a special group, and that was good—exciting, even—but at the same time, it was cause for alarm. We knew we were "chosen" for special treatment but hadn't a clue what that treatment might be. Perhaps some of the students' parents were more concretely aware, but I have the feeling they were careful not to scare their children unnecessarily. Not a single one of us had the slightest notion of what was in store.
Just before the school year began in September 1941, I had my bar mitzvah—the ceremony for a Jewish boy when he reaches his thirteenth birthday and thus, his "religious majority." The rite is often performed in a synagogue. I celebrated my bar mitzvah in a synagogue on Lek Street (the building is still there, although it no longer serves as a synagogue). At the time, the oppression of Dutch Jews didn't seem overwhelming yet—certainly not enough to prevent us from having a party. We had invited some twenty guests. I received books on chemistry (my great passion), and my mother baked a cake.
The faculty at the lyceum was not only extremely competent, but very nice as well. Jaap Meijer, my history teacher, would later become the editor of the newspaper De Joodse wachter (The Jewish guardian). The famed Dutch writer Jacques Presser was another beloved teacher. I didn't have any favorite subjects in particular, though I did especially well with math and the exact sciences: chemistry, physics, geometry, and algebra.
Today, I don't think of the lyceum as a "Jewish school," but rather just as a regular school attended by Jews. We didn't often pay much attention to our faith, and when we did, it was with so little fanfare that I don't remember it at all. Nor do I remember any religious instruction or specific ceremonies. I hadn't been raised Orthodox, so I didn't miss any of it.
Neither can I recall that my classmates and I spoke very much about our faith or our Jewish heritage, even though that was the very reason for our being together. We probably didn't discuss it at school because the subject received plenty of attention at home. There, we had many discussions about Judaism, but more specifically about restrictions the Germans were imposing on us. It was primarily away from home and the school that they harassed us, and we kept these conversations behind closed doors.
One day, a few children didn't show up to class. That's how simply it all began. The next day, someone else was gone. Slowly, gradually, the classrooms emptied out. Students changed their seats just to remain close to one another. No one dared ask out loud where the other children were—one way or another, we knew that this subject was taboo in the classroom. They were absent and we didn't want to—we didn't dare —know anything further. Arrested or in hiding—who could tell? The only thing we knew for sure was that the students weren't absent because they were sick, and that it might have something to do with the labor camps in Germany. I myself had never seen a roundup, but I knew they happened. Adult Jews had been periodically summoned for this purpose, and from the spring of 1942 on, children barely sixteen years of age started to be included. That is how the then-sixteen-year-old Margot Frank, Anne's older sister, was called up, which convinced the Frank family to go into hiding.
It was during this same period that my parents also decided to take our family underground. I would have to go into hiding and would no longer attend school. I, too, would appear in the absentee notebook without anyone knowing what was wrong with me or where I was.
I was forced to leave before Anne Frank. At the time, she was just one of my many classmates and hadn't made a particular impression on me, although I did like her—not in a romantic sense, as I wasn't old enough for a serious relationship, nor, I think, was anyone else in our class. There may have been some youthful swooning, but no official "going steady," kissing, or more advanced amorous practices. In those days, it was quite a big deal to even walk together holding hands.
I still have a hard time calling her Anne. In our class, she was simply Annelies, the name by which she was known to everyone. It seems that she herself preferred Anne. It's the name she used in her diary and what appeared on the cover of the published edition. Be that as it may, in class it was "Annelies," and that's what I've always called her. Likewise, she never could have known that my name would become Theo later on. To her I was Maurice.
A total of 490 boys and girls had attended the Jewish lyceum, only half of whom returned after the war. My class, 1L2, had thirty students, seventeen of whom were killed in the Nazi concentration camps. Today eight live in the Netherlands, two live in Israel, and one lives in Brazil; the locations of the last two are unknown.
The first classmate I'm going to look up is Hannah Pick-Goslar, who lives in Israel. The drive to her house in Jerusalem is not quite sixty kilometers (thirty-five miles). Normally, it takes less than an hour to get to Jerusalem, but it's a terribly hot day and the traffic is bad. Despite the attention that the driving requires, I'm trying to review Hannah's history with Eyal, the film director. I know that she moved with her parents from Berlin to Amsterdam before the war broke out in the Netherlands. She and her whole family were arrested during the great roundup in Amsterdam-South on June 20, 1943. Hannah ended up in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. There, across a barbed-wire fence, she had a few brief conversations with Anne Frank. The first time she spoke with Anne was through a certain Mrs. Daan, a friend of the Frank family, who could see over the fence and tell Hannah that Anne was with her. Having assumed that Anne and her family were safely in Switzerland, Hannah couldn't believe Mrs. Daan. But then she heard Anne's voice. They were unable to see each other because the fence was lined with straw. But after they spoke with each other for a short while, Hannah promised her she'd throw a Red Cross package over the barbed wire, for on her side of the fence—which held the exchange prisoners—the captives would occasionally receive small relief packages. The following evening, she threw a package, but someone else caught it and quickly took off. A few days later, she tried again and succeeded.
Today, I want to discuss the small things with Hannah—the little things we used to do like every other child our age. I'm also curious to know her memories of our time at the lyceum.
Once we arrive, the stress of the trip quickly fades away. Hannah is a cheerful woman, with red lipstick, a red blouse, and a charming little white hat. She has a brimming bookcase and an apartment that's as bright as it is colorful—she still thoroughly enjoys life, despite her age. The sun shines sharply on the windowpanes and filters through the lace curtains, bathing the living room with light. We have cookies and drink lemonade as if Hannah has decided it will help us reminisce.
On her bookcase, I see an old edition of Anne's Tales from the Secret Annex. I take it out and open it. "Do you know that I'm mentioned here?" I ask. I look for the short chapter on the lyceum and read out loud the section that includes my name. Surprised, Hannah laughs: she hadn't known. Of course, everybody who was a classmate of Anne's and survived the war owns everything she ever wrote and has read all of it at least once—but that doesn't mean we know it all by heart.
With her index finger, Hannah pushes her glasses into their proper position and reads me a passage from Anne's diary. It comes from the entry of Saturday, November 27, 1943. Anne has a dream, a nightmare, about Hannah: "I saw her before me, dressed in rags, her face thin and worn out. Her eyes were very large and she looked at me so sadly and with such reproach that what I read in her eyes was: 'Oh Anne, why have you deserted me?' "
Very briefly, Hannah tenses but keeps on reading. Anne describes how guilty she feels and hopes that God will bring her solace. Anne could not know where Hannah was at that moment, because most news from the outside didn't reach the Secret Annex. "I mustn't go on thinking about it," Anne's entry continues, "because it doesn't get me anywhere. I just keep seeing her great big eyes, and can't free myself from them."
With poise, Hannah closes her copy of the book. She seems to be deciding whether to return it to the bookcase right away, and then places it on the table between us. Suddenly, the cookies and lemonade seem less convivial.
I remember that in elementary school, I had to ask my mother's permission to invite Anne to our house. Of course, that's not unusual for children of that age, but also at play at that time was the divide between Dutch Jews and Jews who came from the east.
My family had been in the Netherlands for generations, and although my mother came from Brussels, her family was from Den Bosch, in the southern part of the country. More than likely, we were descendants of Portuguese Jews, who could have been named Castro or Da Costa. It is likely that at some point, our name had been given a more Dutch-sounding form, or perhaps a distant ancestor had actually been a koster (a sexton). All the same, in our family, no one spoke Yiddish, which was more typical of theOstjuden, the Jews from eastern Germany and Poland. Many of them had gone to the Netherlands seeking refuge from the Nazis. They naturally encountered problems there: they had been forced to abandon friends and colleagues against their will, they spoke no Dutch, and they had to find new work. In addition, many people looked down on them, considering them less civilized. However, Anne wasn't from eastern Germany but from Frankfurt: asking my mother for permission was merely a formality. I knew her the way all our classmates knew each other: we rode our bikes to school together and invited one another to birthday parties.
I say to Hannah, "In her diary, Anne writes something about a birthday party at her house. Do you remember that I was also invited to their place on the Merwedeplein?"
"Hmm," she responds after thinking it over. "To be honest, I don't recall any boys there at all."
"I really was there, though: 1942."
"Ah, wait ... the party in 1942 when we watched that film!"
"Exactly—that's when Otto showed Rin Tin Tin."
"Oh yes, something's coming back to me now. Maybe they'd invited a lot of people because going to the movies was forbidden then. And perhaps that's why she invited boys as well. Because she always had many boyfriends."
"Yes, no shortage of those. Or, how did Anne herself put it? 'I have a slew of admirers who adore me and, when nothing else is feasible, try to get a glimpse of me in class with a broken pocket mirror.' Saturday, June 20, 1942. It's right here."
The party of Anne's to which I'd been invited was a daytime event at the house of the Frank family on the Merwedeplein on, maybe, a Saturday afternoon. All the kids who'd been invited were looking forward to seeing the movie Rin Tin Tin, a film about a heroic German shepherd—a kind of predecessor to Lassie.
Otto Frank worked for Opekta, a brand of pectin, which in those days was an essential ingredient for making jam. Before showing Rin Tin Tin, he played a short film about the uses of pectin, which I found interesting because my mother made her own strawberry jam.
There was no Coca-Cola, but we had lemonade, and there were cookies and a cake. Anne was quite popular, so there were a lot of boys and girls. She displayed her presents on a table. I don't recall what I gave her—probably a book.
"How would you describe Anne?" I ask Hannah.
"She was like pepper," she answers. "In Holland, I think you'd probably call her a know-it-all. My mother always said, 'God knows everything, but Anne knows everything better.' And I believe that Anne truly thought she knew everything better." Hannah laughs.
There may be something to this. I'd call her impudent. In class, she had no problem speaking out of turn. She was certainly bright, but I had never thought of her as extraordinarily intelligent.
Hannah recalls that after the war, she asked Mrs. Kuperus, the principal, whether she could show the school to her husband.
"When we were at the school with her, I asked, 'Did you see anything special in Anne at the time?' She said she hadn't, but I think she was right when she remarked 'When a girl at that age is removed from friends, plants, animals—from everything, really—and you put her in a home with only adults, everything develops much faster. Who knows—if there had been no war, she might not have become a great writer until she was thirty.' Circumstances sped up everything, including her development as a writer. She wrote so beautifully, especially for a girl that age."
"And she also spoke perfect Dutch, without any accent—while one of her friends, a certain Hanneli Goslar, still had a German accent," I say teasingly.
Hannah laughs. "We came from Berlin and spoke German at home. Not so at the Franks', where they had two Dutch-speaking daughters. My mother knew Dutch well, but my father didn't really. My mother was very good with languages, and with Greek and Latin, too, for that matter."
"My mother was born in the French-speaking part of Brussels," I say, "but during the First World War, she moved to the neutral Netherlands to be safer. That's where she met my father, und von Spass kommt Ernst und der Ernst bin Ich [it started as fun and turned into earnest, and I am this Ernest]. In her later years, she still had a Belgian accent."
I ask about Anne's supposed love of movies.
"I don't know," Hannah says, "but she certainly loved movie stars. They really weren't of any interest to me, so I never collected film-star photographs like the ones she had on her wall in the Secret Annex. You Can't Take It with You was a film that deeply affected me at the time—it had to do with wealthy people who couldn't take their money to the grave with them. Occasionally, my mother would take me to the Cineac movie house, where they showed children's films on a regular basis. I don't know whether or how frequently Anne used to go. We both loved Shirley Temple films."
My unusual interest in games may be a professional aberration, but it's to get a more complete picture of our youth that I ask about the games Hannah and Anne used to play—assuming they played any at all.
"Absolutely!" Hannah says enthusiastically. "Monopoly and Parcheesi. We were really crazy about Monopoly, which we played all the time."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from We All Wore Stars by Theo Coster, Marjolijn de Jager. Copyright © 2009 Theora Design and Uitgeverij Carrera, Amsterdam. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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