Hanneli, ran over to her, and threw her arms around her. “From then on we were friends.” Anne’s friendships, like those of many girls her age, had the intensity of love affairs, with all the concomitant jealousies, quarrels, separations, and reconciliations. Her high spirits and affectionate, impulsive generosity put her at the center of a tight clique that included Hanneli Goslar and Susanne Lederman. Their exclusive little trio was known, in their neighborhood, as Anne, Hanne, and Sanne.
Eva Geiringer-Schloss, Anne’s near neighbor on Merwedeplein, arrived from Vienna, via Brussels, in 1940. After the war, her mother, Fritzi, would marry the widowed Otto Frank. In her memoir, Eva’s Story, Anne’s former classmate describes the “inseparable” Anne-Hanne-Sanne troika as being more sophisticated, more like teenagers, than the other girls, whom the chosen three—giggling about boys and fashion and film magazines—viewed with barely concealed disdain. They were famously boy crazy, especially Anne. One friend remembered Anne assuming that every boy wanted to be her boyfriend. Hanneli Goslar remarked that Anne was “always fussing” with her long hair. “Her hair kept her busy all the time.”
Eva’s memories of the enviably stylish Anne Frank include this revealing story:
Once, when Mutti had taken me to the local dressmaker to have a coat altered, we were sitting waiting our turn and heard the dressmaker talking to her customer inside the fitting room. The customer was very determined to have things just right.
“It would look better with larger shoulder pads,” we could hear her saying in an authoritative tone of voice, “and the hemline should be just a little higher, don’t you think?”
We then heard the dressmaker agreeing with her and I sat there wishing I was allowed to choose exactly what I wanted to wear. I was flabbergasted when the curtains were drawn back and there was Anne, all alone, making decisions about her own dress. It was peach-coloured with a green trim.
She smiled at me. “Do you like it?” she said, twirling around.
Interviewed by Ernst Schnabel, a novelist and dramatist who served in the German navy during World War II and who wrote the 1958 book Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage, the mother of Anne’s friend Jopie van der Waal (Schnabel employed the pseudonym used in Anne’s diary for Jacqueline van Maarsen) also remembered making dresses for Anne. But what she mostly recalled is Anne’s forceful personality, her desire to be a writer, and her precocious sense of self. The phrase, “She knew who she was,” recurs, like a refrain, throughout the conversation, during which Mme. Van der Waal described the ceremony and the theater with which Anne arrived to spend the weekend:
“When Anne came to stay with us, she always brought a suitcase. A suitcase, mind you, when it wasn’t a stone’s throw between us. The suitcase was empty of course, but Anne insisted on it, because only with the suitcase did she feel as if she were really traveling.”
A FLICKER of a home movie. June 22, 1941. The whole thing lasts ten seconds.
The bicycles slipping by provide the only indication that we are in Holland. The brick Merwedeplein apartment block looks more like married students’ housing on an American state university campus than the quaint center-city canal houses we associate with Amsterdam.
The camera waits outside a door, peering up a stairwell. In search of something to focus on, it pans up the side of a building. In the open windows are neighborhood residents, girls and young women, their elbows propped on the sills, waiting. The women at the windows alter the look of the street, so the scene begins to look more like a village in southern Europe.
The newlywed couple appears, arm in arm, the groom in a top hat, cane, and formal wear, the bride in a flattering pale suit, a jaunty white fedora, and gloves; she carries a bouquet. They walk down the stairs and pause like
Eva Geiringer-Schloss, Anne’s near neighbor on Merwedeplein, arrived from Vienna, via Brussels, in 1940. After the war, her mother, Fritzi, would marry the widowed Otto Frank. In her memoir, Eva’s Story, Anne’s former classmate describes the “inseparable” Anne-Hanne-Sanne troika as being more sophisticated, more like teenagers, than the other girls, whom the chosen three—giggling about boys and fashion and film magazines—viewed with barely concealed disdain. They were famously boy crazy, especially Anne. One friend remembered Anne assuming that every boy wanted to be her boyfriend. Hanneli Goslar remarked that Anne was “always fussing” with her long hair. “Her hair kept her busy all the time.”
Eva’s memories of the enviably stylish Anne Frank include this revealing story:
Once, when Mutti had taken me to the local dressmaker to have a coat altered, we were sitting waiting our turn and heard the dressmaker talking to her customer inside the fitting room. The customer was very determined to have things just right.
“It would look better with larger shoulder pads,” we could hear her saying in an authoritative tone of voice, “and the hemline should be just a little higher, don’t you think?”
We then heard the dressmaker agreeing with her and I sat there wishing I was allowed to choose exactly what I wanted to wear. I was flabbergasted when the curtains were drawn back and there was Anne, all alone, making decisions about her own dress. It was peach-coloured with a green trim.
She smiled at me. “Do you like it?” she said, twirling around.
Interviewed by Ernst Schnabel, a novelist and dramatist who served in the German navy during World War II and who wrote the 1958 book Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage, the mother of Anne’s friend Jopie van der Waal (Schnabel employed the pseudonym used in Anne’s diary for Jacqueline van Maarsen) also remembered making dresses for Anne. But what she mostly recalled is Anne’s forceful personality, her desire to be a writer, and her precocious sense of self. The phrase, “She knew who she was,” recurs, like a refrain, throughout the conversation, during which Mme. Van der Waal described the ceremony and the theater with which Anne arrived to spend the weekend:
“When Anne came to stay with us, she always brought a suitcase. A suitcase, mind you, when it wasn’t a stone’s throw between us. The suitcase was empty of course, but Anne insisted on it, because only with the suitcase did she feel as if she were really traveling.”
A FLICKER of a home movie. June 22, 1941. The whole thing lasts ten seconds.
The bicycles slipping by provide the only indication that we are in Holland. The brick Merwedeplein apartment block looks more like married students’ housing on an American state university campus than the quaint center-city canal houses we associate with Amsterdam.
The camera waits outside a door, peering up a stairwell. In search of something to focus on, it pans up the side of a building. In the open windows are neighborhood residents, girls and young women, their elbows propped on the sills, waiting. The women at the windows alter the look of the street, so the scene begins to look more like a village in southern Europe.
The newlywed couple appears, arm in arm, the groom in a top hat, cane, and formal wear, the bride in a flattering pale suit, a jaunty white fedora, and gloves; she carries a bouquet. They walk down the stairs and pause like
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