Jannie Brandes-Brilleslijper, the last person known to have seen Anne Frank alive and a member of the Nazi resistance in occupied Netherlands, has died. She was 86.
She worked as a nurse in the Nazi camps where she provided clothing, medicine, and food to fellow prisoners. She saw Anne Frank, the Jewish teenage diarist, two or three days before she died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the spring of 1945.
She also informed Otto Frank, Anne's father, of his daughter's death after the war.
''Anne was sick and hallucinating and had thrown away her clothes because she was afraid of lice. Ms Brandes-Brilleslijper gave her clothes and some food,'' Mariette Huisjes of the Anne Frank Housesaid. ''She mostly helped young people in the camps in those difficult times.''
Brandes-Brilleslijper worked in the Jewish resistance, forging identification papers to help other Jews escape the Nazis, before she was deported along with Anne on a transport out of Amsterdam. They both survived stays in the Westerbork and Auschwitz camps.
In her own writing, Brandes-Brilleslijper described helping other Jews hide in Amsterdam, and meeting Anne and her family. She also wrote of the horror of arriving at the Birkenau death camp and the constant stench of burning bodies from the crematorium.
''We travelled on an ordinary train,'' she said in a compilation of her writing published on
her 70th birthday. ''The Frank
family with two daughters was in the same train and we met them later.
''We were stripped in an icy room with the wind billowing through it. Five women under one trickle of water. No towels. Tattooed, shaved . . . we were totally confused and unable
to understand anything,'' she wrote.
Later, she dreamed of her children and wrote about meeting her sister, Lientje, who was deported along with their entire family.
''Lientje and I were able to stay together, just like the sisters Anne and Margot Frank,'' she said.
More than 100,000 Jews - 70% of the Dutch Jewish community - were deported from the Netherlands to concentration camps. Anne, born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929, came to the Netherlands with her parents who fled in 1933
to escape persecution under Adolf Hitler's National Socialist party.
Her diary, which describes her family's two years in a canal-side attic hideaway, is one of the world's most widely-read books.
After the war, Brandes-Brilleslijper returned to the Dutch capital, where she had grown up with Jewish parents who ran a fish shop near Amsterdam's Jordaan district.
She is survived by her two children.
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