AOL News posted an Associated Press story earlier this week about a Holocaust survivor named Berthe Meijer, now 71.  Mrs. Meijer (at age 6) was an inmate at the Nazi concentration camp Bergen Belsen for 13 months until it was liberated in April 1945.  Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial authority, has confirmed this.  Her memoir, which will be published in Dutch later this month, recounts a memory of Anne Frank telling stories to the younger children in the camp to take their minds off their surroundings.

The article points out:

“Around 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands before the 1940-45 Nazi occupation. Of those, 107,000 were deported to Germany and only 5,200 survived.

“The Meijers and the Franks were acquaintances before the war: members of both families had fled Germany during the rise of Hitler’s regime and found a place in the tightly-knit Jewish community in Amsterdam. The Meijers lived on the same street where Anne attended a Montessori elementary school.”

Please follow the link to the article to read the entire story.  It is an inspiring story.  I will admit that I didn’t realize that there were children in the concentration camps.  I was under the impression that they were sent to the gas chambers as soon as they arrived.  I can’t imagine the imprint an experience like the concentration camps would leave on a young child.  It is comforting to know that there were people in the camps that tried to protect the young and vulnerable from the reality around them.