Anne Frank by Melissa Müller

Author:Melissa Müller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Jacqueline van Maarsen

Anne and Jacque had known each other for a little less than nine months, but short as their relationship was, it had not lacked in intensity or, for that matter, in conflict and jealousy, for Anne did not suffer rivals gladly. The two girls were very different. It may have seemed that Anne was the leader, but actually she deferred to the more reserved Jacque. Anne hoped that Jacque could tell her something about sexuality, for example. When Anne—betraying both her naïveté and her lack of inhibition—asked if she could touch Jacque’s breasts as “a sign of friendship,” Jacque had refused. Disappointed, Anne was mollified only when Jacque had allowed her a kiss on the cheek.

The same day as her “farewell letter,” Anne wrote Jacque a second. She fantasized that her friend had already answered her earlier letter. “I think of you so often,” wrote Anne, who worried a lot about the fates of her friends. Some months later, she would learn from Miep Gies that Jacque and her family had been saved from deportation. Jacque’s Catholic mother had been able to convince an official of the security service that her husband, a Jewish antique dealer, had registered their children in the Jewish congregation against her will. After a number of exchanges and much nerve-racking correspondence, not only were Jacque and her sister struck from the Nazis’ list but their father was as well. He had managed to acquire a false medical certification that he had been sterilized. Such certification saved Jews in mixed marriages from deportation.

Jacque took off her Jewish star and switched from the Jewish lyceum to the highly regarded girls’ lyceum, the school in which she should have been enrolled two years earlier but to which, as a Jew, she had not been admitted. Now a stamp in her identity papers had radically changed her life.

Jacque may have been safe, but she was uprooted, a commuter between two worlds. In the morning, she went to school with “Aryan” pupils and saw how little they knew about the suffering of the Jews and how they never spoke about it. In the afternoon, she met with her Jewish friends, the members of her Ping-Pong club, for example—Hanneli Goslar, Sanne Ledermann, and Ilse Wagner—or her former lyceum friend Nanette “Nanny” Blitz. Anne and Nanny were probably too much alike to be good friends. Of this pretty girl from a well-to-do family, Anne had written that her “dreadful tittle-tattle is beyond a joke. When she asks you something she’s always fingering your hair or fiddling with your buttons” (June 15, 1942; ver. A). Nanette’s father had been the director of the Amsterdam Bank, but when all the bank’s Jewish staff were laid off, he, as a senior executive, was forced to retire.

After Anne’s disappearance, Jacque’s friendship with Nanny grew closer, but it was a friendship that would soon end. Month by month Jacque’s circle of Jewish friends grew smaller. One friend after another was arrested and deported, and Jacque often learned only much later what had happened to them.

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