Laureen Nussbaum
Anne Frank’s childhood friend tells the story of the German official who saved her family
(JTA) — At age 92, Laureen Nussbaum is one of the few people still alive who personally knew Anne Frank.
Nussbaum’s family lived in the same Amsterdam neighborhood as the Franks, and Anne’s father, Otto, was the best man at her 1947 wedding. After the war, Otto spent months trying to find his daughters, Anne and Margot, who had been deported to Bergen-Belsen. With Nussbaum’s husband, Rudi, Otto would go to the train station every day with photos of his children hoping for news of their fate.
“They showed those pictures and asked everyone, ‘Did you by chance know this woman? Did you know by chance know these girls?’” Nussbaum said in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And that’s how they bonded.”
The effort was ultimately for naught. Of the 100,000 Dutch Jews deported from the Netherlands between 1942 and 1945, only 5,200 survived. Neither Rudi’s mother nor the Frank daughters were among them.
But Nussbaum’s entire Jewish family survived. In her new memoir, “Shedding Our Stars: A Story of Hans Calmeyer and How He Saved Thousands of Families Like Mine” (written with Karen Kirtley), Nussbaum focuses less on her famous friend than on Calmeyer, the little-known German official who saved her family.
