Her name has been read by tens of millions around the world but her story is seldom told — until now.
On Wednesday, family members commemorated the young Ilse Wagner, a classmate of Anne Frank, who suffered the same terrible fate as the famous teen diarist — murdered in a Nazi death camp.
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They unveiled a “Stolperstein” or “stumbling block”, a polished brass plaque in the pavement, to Ilse Wagner and her family in a small ceremony in eastern Amsterdam, outside the house from which they were deported.
Helen Romain-Levien, a second cousin of Ilse Wagner, who came from San Francisco for the ceremony, said: “It’s beautiful they’re all together now because they weren’t. They were separated and killed.”
The date of April 2 was not chosen at random. That was the date in 1943 on which Ilse, her mother Johanna, and her grandmother Golda arrived at the Sobibor death camp and were instantly gassed to death. Ilse was 14.
Alfred, her father, had already been murdered at Auschwitz.
“We know almost everything there is to know about Anne Frank. I mean she has a whole museum devoted to her name and rightly so,” said Richard Grootbod, co-producer of the “Weggemund” (“Wiped Away”) podcast.
“But if you look at the life story of Ilse Wagner, her life story is as horrible and gruesome as any person during this war,” Grootbod told AFP.
“And so I think she deserved her story to be told.”
Podcast co-producer Patty-Lou Middel-Leenheer, also attending the ceremony, added: “She was a friend of Anne Frank. And we knew almost nothing about her.”
“Her story is like context to the story of Anne Frank, but we found out that it was a story in itself altogether,” she told AFP.
Around 107,000 Dutch Jews and refugees were deported during World War II, while 102,000 were killed — roughly 75 percent of the pre-war Jewish population.
Janny van der Molen, author of a book about the other children cited in the famous diary, said: “In Jewish tradition, we say that as long as we mention the name, someone is still alive, someone is still with us.”
“So it’s very, very special for me that we can now end this search by giving her her name,” she said, visably moved as she gazed at the Stolperstein.
AFP