Anne Frank: the real story of the girl behind the diary
Boisterous, popular, self-aware: a new collection of all Frank’s known writing brings her into sharp focus, says the Costa-winning biographer
Bart van Es
Sat 25 May 2019 02.00 EDT
Albert Gomes de Mesquita is one of the last people alive to have known Anne Frank in person. He appears briefly in her diary as a fellow student at the Jewish Lyceum in Amsterdam, where she writes of him: “Albert de Mesquita came from the Montessori School and jumped a year. He’s really clever.â€
There is nothing else. In all likelihood, Albert more or less vanished from her memory, but for him the situation is, inevitably, very different.
As the years have gone by his memories of Anne have become ever more important. Aged 89, he still travels internationally to conferences on her work and life. Anne has become a strange kind of celebrity and Albert, as someone who was actually there at the birthday party at which she was given her still-empty diary, is a point of contact for that fame.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/25/anne-frank-full-story-bart-van-es?utm_source=pocket-newtab
