She was called the ‘Anne Frank who lived’. Edith Velmans, who also kept a diary during World War II that later became famous, managed to hide from Nazis hunting Jews as a teenager. She died Friday at the age of 97. Her daughter reported that.
Velmans became famous for the acclaimed and prize-winning book Edith’s story that describes her life story. Her parents told their teenager during the war years that it was too dangerous to keep a diary while hiding from the Nazis.
Velmans did it anyway and later – with the help of her daughter Hester Velmans – turned it into her masterpiece, which was released in 1997. The book, also translated and published in other countries, is hailed as the story of the ‘Anne Frank who lived’ at the time when the majority of Dutch Jews were murdered by the Holocaust.
Family
Edith would never see her family again after the war. Her mother was hospitalized with a broken hip during the invasion. Like many other patients, she was initially sent to a transit camp and then to the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland.
Her father was also hospitalized. He was not deported, but nevertheless died not long after. Her brother tried to escape the horrors of the Germans, but was betrayed and sent to Auschwitz where he also died.
Diary
Velmans, who was born in The Hague, started writing her diary before the war. In the late 1930s she writes about her daily life at school, boys and other typical girls’ affairs. When the Netherlands is invaded, the then 15-year-old has to go into hiding in Breda, where she lives without her family for many years with a retired teacher couple, under difficult circumstances. She took a false name and the couple made up a story about who the girl was. The neighbors believed them.
If Edith’s story – in which she has supplemented her diary with letters and memories from that time – appears at the end of the nineties, it is going fast. It has sold over a million copies worldwide. “She was brave,” Hester said of her mother. “Against the wishes of her parents, both her real and her adoptive parents, she kept a diary. Despite the dangers involved.”
In 1996 the writer was appointed Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau by Queen Beatrix.
‘True Survivor’
Edith Velmans-van Hessen, as her full name was, lived in America for decades, where she was associated with the Anne Frank Center USA and the Netherland-America Foundation, among others. In the following years she also lived in Baltimore, Geneva, London and New York, because of the international work of her husband Loek Velmans.
Eventually she moved to Sheffield, England. She passed away peacefully on Friday at the age of 97, her daughter said in an obituary. “My mother is a real survivor,” she stated. “She was not bitter. She always wanted to look further and ahead, and yet saw all the good in the world.”