We All Wore Stars: Memories of Anne Frank from Her Classmates - Hardcover

"We All Wore Stars is an intimate and poignant portrait of the day-to-day lives of Jewish children during wartime. The innocence and warmth of many of their childhood memories contrasts starkly with the horrors of the Holocaust. This powerful book asserts that life in wartime requires constant reflection, something which is all too apparent after reading it." - Gavin Porter, The Big Issue

"Anne Frank has become a universal symbol of the brutalised and extinguished innocence of childhood in the Holocaust. Yet the sheer scale of her legend tends to obscure the quite ordinary quality of her life as she lived it before going into hiding. By highlighting the experiences of those who shared her school days and survived the war, Theo Coster helps us to see Anne alive in her community, one child among the millions touched so dramatically by evil. Their tales of survival offer a poignant and inspiring contrast to Anne's horrifying death." - Ben Barkow, Director, The Wiener Library, London

In 1941, Theo Coster was a student at the Amsterdam Jewish Lyceum, one in a class of 28 Jewish children that the Nazis had segregated from the rest of the Dutch population. Among Theo’s fellow students was a young Anne Frank, whose diary would later become one of the most important documents of the Holocaust. In this remarkable group portrait, Coster and five of his fellow classmates gather their personal stories and memories of Anne. The accounts collected here do not just help us to rediscover Anne Frank. They also stand on their own as remarkable stories of ingenuity and survival during the Holocaust - from Albert Gomes de Mesquita, who hid in ten different towns across Europe - to Hannah Goslar, whoexperienced the horrors of Bergen-Belsen but also made a miraculous reconnection with Anne days before her death.