Anne Frank knew soon after meeting classmate Jacqueline van Maarsen that she had found a kindred spirit.
On 15 June 1942, just days after her 13th birthday, Anne wrote that the new girl who'd recently transferred to the Jewish Lyceum “is now my best friend,” and for a brief period, they were inseparable.
Anne and her family went into hiding a few weeks later. Unable to send letters to her new best friend for fear of being caught, Anne wrote messages to Jacqueline in her diary; in September she penned a farewell, expressing her hope that “until we see each other again, we will always remain ‘best’ friends.”
Anne was murdered at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, and Jacqueline would not read her old friend’s letters – or know of her condition – until years later.
But Jacqueline van Maarsen, who passed away at the age of 96 last week, made it her purpose later in life to tell the story of their friendship, writing and lecturing about Anne and the Holocaust and supporting the Anne Frank House until her own death.
Jacqueline van Maarsen, pictured at the theatre performance ANNE based on the life of Anne Frank in 2015 in Amsterdam, was Anne Frank's 'best friend'. (Photo by JERRY LAMPEN/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)ANP/AFP via Getty Images
Born in Amsterdam in 1929, Jacqueline was the daughter of a Jewish father and a mother who converted to Judaism. She later wrote that her mother convinced the Sicherheitsdienst, the organisation responsible for arranging the deportation of Jews, “to delete our names from this list by showing them that we only had two Jewish grandparents and not four.”
On the pretext that her husband had registered her and the children as Jews without her knowledge, Jacqueline’s mother managed to get herself and her daughters declared as non-Jewish in 1942, thereby saving the family from deportation to the camps. Most of the family on Jacqueline's father's side were murdered.
Jacqueline, who said she maintained “vivid memories” of her time with Anne, described the moment they met: “I was bicycling home after my first day of school when a small wisp of a girl with sharp facial features and shiny dark hair caught up with me. She called out my name and asked if I was going in the same direction. I asked her what her name was and she said, "My name is Anne…, Anne Frank."
Years later, Jacqueline would use that simple introduction as the title to one of the several books she wrote about Anne.
Jacqueline worked as an award-winning bookbinder after the war and, in 1954, she married her childhood friend Ruud Sanders, with whom she had three children and seven grandchildren.
She kept in touch with Anne’s father Otto, who survived the Holocaust, until his death in 1980, describing the consolation he sought in her company.
“Otto Frank came around almost every day,” Jacqueline wrote. “He spoke about Anne in the hiding place on the Prinsengracht and about the diary she had written there which he was reading. He cried a lot. It was difficult. I was sixteen and to me Otto Frank was an old man. The only thing I could do was listen. ‘I realize now that I wasn’t much use to you then,’ I wrote to him years later. Sometimes he brought the diary with him and showed me what Anne had written.”
Jacqueline kept silent about her friendship with Anne until the publication of her book Anne and Jopie, at which point she felt it was her duty to "write for her who could no longer write." She went on to write three more books, including Your Best Friend Anne, which won the Zilveren Griffel in 2012. Jacqueline also regularly began speaking to audiences about both her friendship with Anne and the dangers of antisemitism.
In 2020, Jacqueline laid the first stone of Amsterdam’s newest Holocaust monument, a project to which she personally donated £41,500.
