Anne Frank Remembered

The Story of the Woman Who Helped Hide the Frank Family

Excerpt:

I was twenty-four in 1933. It was a difficult year for me. I had been without a job for

several months, fired, along with another employee, from the textile company where I’d had

my first and only job as an office worker. Times were bad and unemployment was high,

especially for the young. Jobs were hard to come by, but being a young woman with an

independent spirit, I was longing to be working again.

My adoptive family and I lived several floors above an older woman, Mrs. Blik, who

occasionally had coffee with my adoptive mother. Mrs. Blik had a rather unusual job for a

woman, even though it was not unusual for Dutch women to work outside the home. She was

a traveling saleswoman and often would be away from home all week—until Saturday, that

is—demonstrating and selling household products to farmers’ wives and to clubs made up of

housewives.

Every Saturday she would return with her empty sample case and report to the firms that

employed her in order to refill her demonstration kit and submit her orders. One Saturday, at

one of her steady places of employment, she heard that one of the office girls was sick and

the firm was looking for a temporary replacement.

That very afternoon, straight from the streetcar, she trudged up the extra steps to our

apartment and knocked on the door. My adoptive mother called me in from the kitchen and

enthusiastically told me about the job. Mrs. Blik handed me a sheet of paper, saying, “First

thing Monday morning…”

I thanked her, becoming excited about the prospect of asserting my independence by

working again…that is, if I could get there early enough and get hired. Where was the

office? I glanced at the paper. Easy, I thought, not twenty minutes by bicycle. Fifteen

perhaps, the way I usually rode—fast. The paper read:

MR. OTTO FRANK

N.Z. Voorburgwal 120-126