Page 395 - The Secret Museum

While Anne’s family went into hiding, Juultje’s family, also Jewish, went on

living in Amsterdam, hoping for the best. Their lives, lived out in the open, were
very restricted and unsafe. As Jews, they were banned from riding bicycles, taking
the tram, driving a car. They had to wear a yellow star, which of course Juultje didn’t
like at all – neither had Anne before she went into hiding. People were disappearing
all the time; taken to concentration camps.

Juultje hadn’t a clue that her friend was living above Otto Frank’s office by the
canal in secret. She believed the Franks had escaped to Switzerland. A year after
Anne Frank went into hiding, a friend of Juultje’s family, a girl named Lineke van der

Valk, was riding her bike one Sunday morning and headed out of Amsterdam. She
came to a roadblock and saw there was about to be a raid on Jewish homes. She
quickly cycled back to warn her friends. Juultje gave Lineke her poësiealbum for
safekeeping. This is how the book survived when Juultje did not. She and her family
were taken from their home.

Juultje and Anne’s Montessori schoolteacher saw the raid happen, as did a
neighbour and friend, Lilian van Delft. Lilian had often shopped for the Ketellapper
family, as Jews were not allowed into shops, and she watched in horror as her

neighbour, whom she said she loved for her honesty and openness, was taken away,
wearing a backpack, a warm wind jacket, a skirt and a pair of good shoes: clothes
Lillian had bought for her. Nobody could do a thing to help.

Three weeks later, Juultje was murdered; gassed in Sobibor in occupied Poland
with her father, mother and sister. Many of her family members from her mother’s
and her father’s side were also killed.

Years after the war was over, in the 1950s, Lineke van der Valk met Kitty Egyedi
(also Jewish), who had survived the war, and returned the poësiealbum to her. Kitty
remembered giving it to Juultje at her birthday party, before the war began and, years

later, she gave it to the Anne Frank House.
When Erika showed it to me, gently resting it on a pillow, I felt incredibly moved.

I was looking at a true hidden treasure: a memory of a happy time when Anne Frank
was a spirited girl writing a poem to her friend. I thought back to that photo of Anne’s
tenth birthday. Then, Anne, Juultje, Kitty and their friends were normal, gorgeous
girls at the beginning of their lives, all with a future to look forward to.

Anne would have had her own poësiealbum just like it, filled with messages from
her friends, but, unlike her diary, it wasn’t saved.

I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or
bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on
living even after my death!

Anne Frank, 5 April 1944