JACQUELINE van Maarsen was 11 years oldinMay1940whentheGermanarmy overran the Netherlands. Her father was Jewish so she was obliged to wear a yellow star of David whenever she stepped outside. Here's how she sums up her life under the Nazi occupation: "I'd had to go to a special school; I had not been allowed to set foot inside any park, zoo, cinema, sports club, library, reading room or museum; we weren't allowed to travel; I wasn't allowed to ride my bike, I wasn't allowed to be outside after 8pm, and I wasn't even allowed to just sit down on a public bench somewhere I was beginning to believe I really was inferior."

She was one of the lucky ones. Her father may have been a Jew but her mother Eline was born and raised in France. That resourceful and strong-minded woman (wholivedtobe101)donnedherbest ParisianfineryandmarchedintoSS headquarters in Amsterdam to persuade the Germans that her two daughters had been enrolled into the Jewish faith by her husband without her consent. As a result, Jacqueline and her sister were removed from the long list of Jews due to be deported to the death camps. So they survived.

But Jacqueline's "dearest friend" Anne Frank was not so fortunate. As the world knows, in September 1942 Anne Frank (and her family) disappeared into an attic above her father's office on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht Canal, after letting it be known that they were fleeing to Switzerland. They remained incarcerated there until August 1944 when they were betrayed "by person or persons unknown". Seven months later, in March 1945, Anne Frank and her older sister Margot perished in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.

There are two strands to Jacqueline van Maarsen's powerful, but simply written book. One is the story of how the van Maarsen family flourished in the Amsterdam of the 1920s and 1930s only to see their world collapse at the beginning of the war. They then struggled to survive the Nazi occupation of Holland. The other is the tale of Jacqueline's relationship with the young Jewish girl who became an icon of the second world war. Anne Frank's famous diary contains many references to her friend Jacqueline, sometimes referred to as "Jopie".

It hardly matters that these two strands of the narrative sometimes fail to mesh. This is an extraordinary story of how ordinary, simple lives were first of all threatened, then touched and then cruelly disrupted or destroyed by anti-Semitism - Dutch as well as German.

Jacqueline van Maarsen does well to remind us that Anne Frank - "a short, skinny girl with shiny black hair" - was no saint. In fact, she comes across as a loveable pain in the neck, like most girls in their early teens. According to van Maarsen she was gossipy, excitable, jealous, prone toteenagecrushesandhadachildish curiosity about sex.

AnneFrank,ofcourse,wasoneof thousandsofJewishchildrenfromthe Netherlands who failed to make it through the war. Some of them had been Jacqueline van Maarsen's friends and schoolmates. She names a few who survived (usually by hiding) but goes on: "The majority of the children at our school, however, were deported to the concentration camps. Most of them never returned. Like Ilse. She was gassed at Sobobor on April 2, 1943." Stark passages such as that stick in the mind like a bone in the throat.

At the end of the war, Anne Frank's father Otto turned up on the van Maarsen family's doorstep, "sad eyes, thin face, his threadbare suit hanging loosely on his emaciated frame". Having survived Auschwitz, he'd been searching for his daughters only to be told they were dead.

"He came to our house almost every day," van Maarsen writes, "and talked to me about what Anne did while in hiding or in Westerbork, the Dutch prison camp. In Westerbork she had gone so far as to declare herself delighted because after two years of being shut in she could finally be outside again, in the sun."

Van Maarsen's own father Hijman also survived, despite being Jewish. One of the few concessions that the Nazis made was that if a Jewish man could prove himself sterile (and thus unable of producing any little Jews) then he could live. Hijman van Maarsen found a doctor who sold him the necessary documentation and lived on to "observe his faith throughout the war, strengthening his belief".

This may not be one of the great books about the second world war but it certainly deserves to be read. Having seen what she's seen, van Maarsen has travelled the world lecturing on intolerance and discrimination. She knows better than most that it still lurks in Europe's darker corners, with the power to play havoc with the lives of children like pretty little dark-haired Anne Frank and her "dearest friend" Jacqueline van Maarsen.