Eva Schloss, a playmate of Anne Frank’s in Amsterdam whose mother later married Anne’s father, recalls an 11-year-old who hopscotched, shot marbles, gossiped and talked so much her friends nicknamed her “Miss Quack Quack.”
Anne also had an intense interest in clothing, boys and Hollywood stars like Deanna Durbin…
…In May 1944, Mrs. Schloss’s family was betrayed and wound up in Auschwitz. Only she and her mother survived.
Otto Frank, knowing his wife had died, was also liberated at Auschwitz and returned to Amsterdam to await news about his daughters. Mrs. Schloss’s mother and Otto became friends and eventually lovers.
“He looked like a ghost,” she said. “One day he came to us with a little parcel. It was a diary. It took him three weeks to read it,” she remembered, and “he said, ‘I didn’t really know my own child.’ ”
via Recalling Anne Frank, as Icon and Human Being – NYTimes.com.
Some stories, in their telling, are so hard to believe and, at their end, are so hard to bear that—if they were not historically, demonstrably real—readers might be forgiven for dismissing them as over the top; stranger than fiction; too fanciful, and dreadful, by half.
And yet anyone who has made it past, say, the eighth grade in virtually any school system anywhere in the world knows at least the rudiments of Anne Frank‘s indelible story—and what’s more, knows it to be true.