PublishedHarper Collins, February 2012 |
ISBN9780732293550 |
FormatSoftcover, 224 pages |
Dimensions21cm × 15.3cm × 1.7cm |
In 1941 Theo Coster was a student at the Amsterdam Jewish Lyceum, one in a class of twenty-eight Jewish children segregated by the Nazis from the rest of the Dutch population. Among Theo's fellow students was Anne Frank, whose diary would later become one of the most important documents of the Holocaust.
In this moving group portrait, Coster and five of his fellow classmates remember the girl they knew and share their own remarkable stories. Their accounts offer rich and often surprising insights into Anne. She is remembered at various times as both vain and compassionate, generous and rebellious - by turns an ordinary child and a precocious girl seemingly destined for greatness. The memories gathered here also stand as powerful individual stories of ingenuity and survival-from Albert Gomes de Mesquita, who had to hide in ten different European towns during the war, to Hannah Goslar, who experienced the horrors of Bergen-Belsen but also made a miraculous reconnection with Anne days before her death. Taken together, these stories reveal the vitality, resilience, and complex humanity of children living through one the darkest chapters in modern history.
