The world lost another hero of World War II this week.
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 at the age of 86. Brandes-Brilleslijper died of heart failure on Friday in Amsterdam, spokeswoman Mariette Huisjes of the Anne Frank House said today.Posted by Alan at August 20, 2003 06:29 AMShe worked as a nurse in the Nazi camps providing clothing, medicine and food to fellow prisoners. She saw 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 told Otto Frank, Anne Frank'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," Huisjes said. "She mostly helped young people in the camps in those difficult times."
Brandes-Brilleslijper worked in the wartime Jewish resistance, forging identification papers to help other Jews escape the Nazis, before she was deported, along with Frank, on a transport out of Amsterdam. They both survived stays in the Westerbork and Auschwitz camps.
via the Sydney Morning Herald