Kirsten: ‘Nikki wants to know everything about Anne Frank’

Photography: Kee & Kee

Since the moment Nikki learned about Anne Frank’s diary at school, she has wanted to know everything about Otto and Edith’s youngest daughter. To accommodate her interest, I decided her It’s war outside read aloud, a children’s book about the life of Anne Frank. Nikki was nine then,
two years younger than Anne when the Second World War broke out. Intense, but in my own way I could introduce her to the horrors of these years and Anne’s grief.

When I closed the book with tears streaming down my cheeks after the last page, Nikki knew one thing for sure: she had to visit the hiding place on the Prinsengracht. Together with Nick and me, she climbed past the cupboard full of files and up the stairs to the Secret Annex. It was oppressive: the idea that the
family had lived there in fear and uncertainty for two years – often in the dark – and could not go outside.

How different it is with girls who live in freedom, who play and howl with laughter, who jump rope together, run across the street and chat shoulder to shoulder. Nikki realized this last week when she went to the Anne Frank House again with school. Nikki, our girl from still
just under thirteen, walking there with her friends, while Anne could only share her secrets and thoughts with Kitty, the diary she had received for her thirteenth birthday… Anne missed her friends she had had to say goodbye to and Nikki felt the loneliness.

It remains special, such a historical black page, described by a girl of thirteen. A page read by so many other thirteen-year-old girls, by girls who empathize and empathize. Who sincerely hope that this period remains history.