Free Anne Frank by Francine Prose

the “better” camps, Bergen-Belsen had degenerated into a hell of chaos and squalor. Tents were erected to shelter the new arrivals at the overcrowded compound, but a storm knocked down the makeshift housing, wounding many of the prisoners, killing some, and leaving the rest unprotected from the cold rain and hail.
    At Bergen-Belsen, Anne met Hanneli Goslar, who described her as “a broken girl.” Hannah, the “Lies” whom Anne had seen in a vision, desperate and starving, had in fact been spared the horrors of Auschwitz and had gone directly from Westerbork to a slightly less terrible section of Bergen-Belsen, in part because her family had Paraguayan passports, which they had purchased in Holland.
    At the Anne Frank Museum, a video monitor plays and replays a filmed interview in which, after fifty years, Hannah Pick-Goslar remembers Anne weeping as she said that she no longer had any parents.
    “I always think,” Hannah reflects, “if Anne had known her father was still alive, she might have had more strength to survive.” Hannah arranged to throw a small package (“a half a cookie, a sock, a glove”) over the fence, at night. The first time, another prisoner stole the package. Hannah describes Anne screaming when the package was stolen. A second package reached her—but failed to prevent the inevitable.
    In The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, Rachel van Amerogen-Frankfoorder reports that the emaciated Frank girls “had little squabbles, caused by their illness…They were terribly cold. They had the least desirable place in the barracks, below, near the door, which was constantly opened and closed. You heard them constantly screaming, ‘Close the door, close the door,’ and the voices became weaker every day…What was so sad, of course, was that these children were so young…They showed the recognizable symptoms of typhus—that gradual wasting away, asort of apathy, with occasional revivals, until they became so sick there wasn’t any hope…One fine day, they weren’t there any longer.” She corrects herself. “Actually, a bad day.”
    Corpses were heaped near the barracks, then buried in mass graves. Rachel van Amerogen-Frankfoorder thinks she might have passed the bodies of the sisters on her way to the latrine. “I don’t have a single reason for assuming that it was any different for them than for the other women with us who died at the same time.”
    This account, by Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper, also appears in the book adapted from Lindwer’s documentary:

    Anne stood in front of me, wrapped in a blanket…And she told me that she had such a horror of the lice and fleas in her clothes and that she had thrown all of her clothes away. It was the middle of winter…I gathered up everything I could find to give her so she was dressed again. We didn’t have much to eat…but I gave Anne some of our bread ration.
    Terrible things happened. Two days later, I went to look for the girls. Both of them were dead!
    First, Margot had fallen out of bed onto the stone floor. She couldn’t get up anymore. Anne died a day later. We had lost all sense of time. It is possible that Anne lived a day longer. Three days before her death from typhus was when she had thrown away all her clothes during dreadful hallucinations.
    A few weeks later, Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British.
     
    T HE play based on The Diary of Anne Frank begins and ends with scenes of Otto Frank returning after the war, telling Miep Gies that his wife and daughters are dead, and finding Anne’s journal in the wreckage of the annex. No one asks or explains whathappened to the others with whom the Franks hid, to the real men and woman on whom the playwrights modeled the characters who have entertained, maddened, and moved us in the production.
    In Auschwitz, the four men from the attic were sent to the same barracks. There they happened to meet Max Stoppelman, a tough, broad-shouldered Dutch Jew in his thirties, hardened by—and