On Wednesday, April 23, 2008, a new valuable piece of history was discovered in a Dutch antique shop known as De Regenboog, located in the town and municipality called Naarden. Naarden is located in the Gooi region in the Netherlands’ province of North Holland. Naarden is a fortified town with walls and a moat, in which both have been restored to a very strong state. It is also located ten miles east of Amsterdam, where there were recent protests of the release of “Fitna,” a fifteen minute film created by far right-wing MP Geert Wilders.
This new and historical piece of history is in the form of a Christmas card. The significance brought onto this Christmas card is that it had the signature of Anne Frank, who became famous after the discovery of her diary after her death at the Bergan-Belsen camp in Germany. This letter was postmarked from Aachen, a town in Germany, located across the Dutch border.
The Christmas card was addressed to one Anne Frank’s best friends, Samme Ledermann. It was discovered by Paul van den Heuvel, a teacher. His father owned De Regenboog. Heuvel discovered this Christmas greeting card in a box full of other cards, when he was collecting stuff for the school celebration of Liberation Day. That was when Heuvel came across the card.
The card had Anne Frank’s signature. However, there was nothing else written by hand on the card. The Anne Frank Museum had confirmed the card to be genuine.
Anne Frank and her family deported to Auschwitz in 1944. She died of typhus while being prisoner at the Bergen-Belsen camp. The age of death was at 15.
On another note, the diary of Hélène Berr was published back in mid-January of 2008. Berr is considered to be France’s version of Anne Frank. Berr was also sent to the same concentration camp as Anne Frank. She also died of typhus. Both Berr and Frank had died one month apart from each other.
While Frank wrote her diary in her early teens, Berr started writing when she was twenty-one years of age. In the case of Berr, she was a college student in France during its occupation by the Nazis.
In the case of Anne Frank, this Christmas card is indeed a historical find. Perhaps there will be more pieces of Anne Frank’s life and history to be discovered in the future. One will never know what s/he will come across in the library or an antique’s shop.