“Meeting” Anne Frank: An Anthology Paperback – March 7, 2021 by Tim Whittome, Joop van Wijk-Voskuijl

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I saw Anne Frank as a friend I never had the chance to meet.
-Joy Gafa’

Your diary was indeed a gift to the world, but I would gladly give up that gift if only you had been able to survive the war.
-Yvonne Leslie

Anne taught me some of the most important life lessons, she showed me the way to writing, and she taught me to laugh.
-Anne Talvaz

“Meeting” Anne Frank: An Anthology celebrates in words and art the stories of twenty of us who have walked with Anne Frank and her family over the course of the last seventy-five years since Anne and her older sister Margot died from typhus, starvation, and Nazi cruelty in Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

None writing here actually “met” or knew Anne personally, but we have “talked” to her and “journeyed” with her kindred spirit. Anne Frank unites us at a time when so much of the world is riven by the familiar and divisive themes of partisan politics, anti-Semitism, and prejudice.

We will also be meeting those who did know Anne’s “most adorable father” Otto, and they have kindly shared their vivid stories in this volume. We cherish the loving father-daughter relationship that has come to mean so much for many of us while not forgetting to also honor Anne’s loving mother Edith and her patient sister Margot. Others writing here have met Anne’s surviving school friends, and we honor their rich journeys.

Anne Frank has become the sister, mother, wife, daughter, girlfriend, or best friend to each of us writing for this anthology. We honor the happy and tragic story of Anne’s brief life, recognizing the “two Annes” in both her sense of fun and mischief and her growing self-awareness in hiding. She was a child while she lived freely in Merwedeplein, Amsterdam, and barely a teenager when she died in a Nazi concentration camp for the simple “crime” of being Jewish.

Anne wanted to “go on living after [her] death” in February or March 1945, and I hope we have honored her lasting wish in this work.

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