New Details Emerge From Anne Frank's Last Weeks

Anne Frank spent the final weeks of her life distracting younger children from the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp in which she ultimately died by telling them fairy tales, says a Dutch woman who as a six-year-old was interned with her at the Bergen Belsen camp. In a new memoir, Berthe Meijer recalls the 15-year-old Anne as a gifted storyteller who told fairy tales "in which nasty things happened, and that was of course very much related to the war," Meijer said.

Authorities on Frank's life are split on whether to believe Meijer. "It could very well be true," said a spokeswoman for the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, but a childhood friend of Frank's who also survived Bergen Belsen disagreed: "In that condition, you almost died," she said. "You had no strength to tell stories." (More Anne Frank stories.)