We All Wore Stars: Memories of Anne Frank from Her Classmates~~Review

We All Wore Stars: Memories of Anne Frank from Her Classmates by Theo Coster
Description: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, who experienced the horrors of Bergen-Belsen but also made a miraculous reconnection with Anne days before her death.

My Review:
This was a very thought provoking book, we have all read her book or at least heard of Anne Frank but we’ve never heard about the kids from her class that survived. So many Jewish kids in the Netherlands went into hiding some were fortunate to be taken in with families that took good care of them some had freedom and some had to stay hidden.

This was a project that encompassed not only a book but a documentary too, (which I really want to see.) Theo Coster went looking for other classmates that also survived to see how they did it and to talk about Anne what they remembered of her, what was her personality really like and did as many boys have crushes on her as she wrote about in her now famous diary. Some of the survivors did end up in camps and some were in hiding with families risking their lives to help them, some hid in villages in the woods. A couple of the girls even saw Anne in Bergen-Belsen before her death.

These stories, as all stories of the Holocaust are so important to tell because the age of survivors is rising and their stories need to be remembered so these atrocities don’t happen again.

This book made me search out the documentary which I unfortunately could not find, but I did watch a different one about other hidden children of the Netherlands and the families that helped them are so amazing. But that is what a book like this should do is make you think, make you research and remember so nothing like this ever happens again. It also makes me want to go back and read Anne’s diary which I haven’t read in quite a few years.

I think this book should be a companion to The Diary of Anne Frank and any classroom that reads Anne’s diary should read this book along with it to hear from people that did survive to tell their tale.

I highly recommend this book.

5 Stars

I received this book from the Librarything Early Reviewers Program