Berthe Meijer

Who was Berthe Meijer?

Jewish teenager Anne Frank did her best to distract younger children from the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp by telling them fairy tales, according to a new book.

After her discovery hiding in the attic of an Amsterdam house Anne was taken to Bergen Belsen.

That Anne had a gift for storytelling was evident from the diary she kept during two years in hiding with her family in Amsterdam. The scattered pages were collected and published after the war in what became the most widely read book to emerge from the Holocaust.

But the new account by fellow inmate Berthe Meijer, now 71, being published in Dutch later this month, is the first to mention Anne's talent for spinning tales even in the despair of the camp. The memoir deals with Ms Meijer's acquaintance with Anne Frank in only a few pages, but she said she titled it "Life After Anne Frank" because it continues the tale of Holocaust victims where the famous diary leaves off.

"The dividing line is where the diary of Anne Frank ends. Because then you fall into a big black hole," she said.

Anne's final diary entry was on August 1, 1944, three days before she and her family were arrested. She and her older sister Margot died in March 1945 in a typhus epidemic that swept through Bergen Belsen, just two weeks before the camp was liberated. Anne was 15.

The stories Anne told were "fairy tales in which nasty things happened, and that was of course very much related to the war," Ms Meijer said. "But as a child you get lifted out of the everyday nastiness. That's something I remember. You're listening to someone telling something that has nothing to do with what's happening around you -- so it's a bit of escape."

The stories she told in the camp were "about princes and elves and those kind of figures," Ms Meijer said.

Despite having unhappy twists, the tales were "quite a bit less terrible than what we saw around us. So you thought: they didn't have it so bad. As a child, you think very primitively about that kind of thing."

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.