Jackie Wyarrtt lives in Birmingham England and is one of our delightful repeat customers. We so enjoy our correspondence with Jackie and she has graciously allowed us to share this article and photos of her dolls on our website.



Jackie Wyartt, who lives in Birmingham, England, has a doll that belonged to Anne Frank. Yes, that Anne Frank.

Anne Frank is the best-known victim of Adolf Hitler’s Jewish Holocaust during World War II. Anne was a German-Jewish teenager who was forced into hiding during the Holocaust.

To avoid deportation, Jews in Holland had to arrange a hiding place with non-Jews. Such hiding places were difficult to find, but Anne’s parents saw the possibility of going into hiding in the annex of the building that housed her father’s business.

On July 6, 1942, the family went into hiding. Even though Anne saw hiding as an exciting adventure in the beginning, soon enough the hiding place became too small for her restless character. For more than two years, Anne Frank described her daily life in hiding in writing.

On August 4, 1944, the Secret Annex was raided by the Security Police. Anne Frank and the seven others in hiding were arrested.

The eight residents were transported to Auschwitz on the last train leaving the transit camp Westerbork. After a month at Auschwitz, Anne Frank and her sister Margot were transported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where thousands of people died of hunger and sickness every day. Margot and Anne both contracted typhus and died within a short time of each other in March 1945, only a few weeks before the liberation.

Of all those in hiding, only Otto Frank survived the camps.

Her diary, saved by one of the family’s helpers, was first published in 1947, under the title Het Achterhuis (in English The Annex). The diary has been translated into more than 50 languages and has sold millions of copies, and remains in print into the 21st century.

The Annex is now a museum and is one of Amsterdam’s most visited sites. Several television and cinema films have been made of the story.

Let Jackie tell the story . . . . .

“My grandmother had a doll’s hospital that she ran between the two World Wars and until her death in 1953.

At the end of WWII, two London Red Cross ambulance drivers, Ms Johnson and Ms Smith followed British troops into Belsen Concentration Camp. On arrival, Ms Johnson gave a Polish lady a small bowl of soup and a bread roll. From under a filthy straw mattress the Polish lady produced 4 to 6 rag dolls which she offered to her as a gesture of gratitude. (Another internee gave her a painting which looks like it was done with house-hold paints.) She told Ms Johnson that they did receive occasional parcels from various charitable organizations (which is very weird) and that not all the camp guards were cruel. Apparently some of the younger guards would deliberately spill food, especially in the vicinity of young women.

It transpired that she had rescued the dolls as their owner’s died, harboring the hope that she might be able to give them to the two young daughters she’s left behind.

Ms Johnson brought these back to England and after carefully cleaning them, put them away. In 1949, she moved to Brum to be nearer her sister and offered the dolls to her two young nieces. But they were only interested in dolls grandmother had on sale in the doll’s hospital, with removable clothes and hair that could be combed.

Ms Johnson often came into the dolls hospital on Saturday Mornings and brought items to sell or to raffle to raise extra funds for the Red Cross.

It was on one of the visits that she bought in the painting and the rag dolls. I was about 4 years old and barely reached the counter and sat on a high stool. She said to me, “Jackie, give the lady 3 shillings out of the till for them.” Grandmother did not consider them worth selling and just gave that amount in order not to discourage her from bringing in other items later. As soon as she was out of ear shot, she asked me to put them into a cardboard box to be taken out with the rubbish. (Ms. Smith was still alive four years ago when I bumped into her at the Birmingham Market. She had seen a newspaper article on my dolls and recognized me.)

As I could not have the dolls for sale, I was taken with their colorful clothes and asked grandma if I might keep them. She agreed but said I had to earn them and for the next 3 weeks I tacked hems into curtains that she was making for the store windows.

But finally they were in my hands!

They were an odd mix. One was dressed in a Polish costume but had lost her shoes and socks. There was a 5 mark piece around her neck – it was on a holder and chain which had turned black so was held round the doll’s neck with a string. The piece was from the Jewish Ghetto in Litzman Stadt, dated 1943. The name inked on this doll was Maria Kitowski’s doll / MST G17. One was in a sort of home made Dutch costume [The Jews who had fled from Berlin, Italy and France and were denied entry into the US, had ended up in Amsterdam] I recall they were Mary Slimalk, P. Micholichique, Marie Kitowski, J. Wesseloski and an unknown. (I traced a Slimak, a Polish man who escaped to the USA and ended up as a lecturer in England. He thought it could have belonged to his 12 year old niece who died in the camps.)

Being a curious child, I tried to undress the dolls, only to find they had names of their concentration camp owners inked on.

One doll bore the name ANNE FRANK ST917 (Ann’s doll was the only one not in regional costume.) Which we thought is Stalag 17, but this is not verified. ST9 could be a street or a region – she was in more than one camp (dying of typhus at Bergen-Belsen) so chances are the doll moved around with her. On studying Marie’s doll it looks like it could also be MSTS 17, so this is really one for the detectives.

Some had numbers on their arms; could these be the same as the numbers on their owner’s arms?

She is 18” tall, not very big, and wears a short of 1940’s or 30’s child’s dress and has a childish expression. She comes with an extra outfit which does not belong to a doll of her type, so maybe someone just liked the idea of a doll having a second regional outfit. Perhaps the most startling thing is the large yellow star, which of course all Jews were forced to wear.

Ms Johnson gave us the second outfit in a string bag and told us the Polish lade gave it to her with this particular doll.

The Polish lady told Ms Johnson that she had only been in the camp 5 months, so it’s possible that most of the camp internees who had survived, had been the last group to arrive. Ms Johnson said most of them were no more than 4 to 5 stone and so were too weak to attempt to escape, even though the camp guards were long gone [apart from the fact that they did not know where to go]. There were about 50,000 in the camp, the dead lying amongst the living and there had been evidence of cannibalism.

She was virtually unknown then, of course, but we later found out she did indeed die in Belsen and this doll came out of Belsen along with the other dolls [who also had names inked on their backs underneath their clothes.]

Many years later and now married with a baby of my own, I was visiting Portobello Market. I stopped at a doll stall and was telling the Jewish stall holder about the doll. She told me Mr. Otto Frank sometimes visited Davies Street Antique Market looking for silver and he could almost always be found around 2:00 pm Thursday afternoons with his friend James Hunter. [Apparently Mr. Frank did not live in England but stayed with his friend when he visited.]

So I told her to tell him I would be there the following week and fifteen minutes after two he DID appear.

I offered him his daughter’s doll which he carefully examined. He could not say with any conviction if it was the one she’d had at 3, but felt if it was not the actual doll, it was quite likely Ann had attempted to copy her doll. He did believe, however, that the inked name was in Ann’s own writing.

After hearing how I had acquired them at the age of 4, and held onto them all these years, he held the doll close to his heart and said: “I think Anne would like you to keep them. If I took them away with me (and I have not many years to go) they would end up in a museum which already have enough of my family’s donations. You’ve had the doll all this time and it never came to any harm in all these years, and but for yourself it would have been disposed of years ago. I really think it is with its rightful custodian. I know my Anne would agree.”

I saw Mr. Frank many times after that around various antique shops, with his friend Mr. Hunter. Occasionally I took tea with them, only for a short while as he always seemed nervously on the move – he had another family by now, of course.

Of the Belsen dolls I have, I suppose Anne’s doll is the least attractive, even though it is the most important.

The value to me is in whom she belonged to and knowing, despite Anne’s suffering, she kept this one familiar, tangible thing, which she had probably long outgrown, with her just because it was a familiar comfort.

If only she could have known her father was still alive, she may have clung on.

The doll is a poignant reminder to me of how she must have suffered and shared her innermost feelings with this small familiar comfort which was all she had left at the very end.

Being of no value, no one bothered to relieve her of it. The Polish lady only rescued it hoping her own children had survived.

How can you even begin to put a price on something so tangible? I was offered a 5 figure sum for her in the early 1980’s but I was not tempted. However, the Women’s Institute fell in love with the dolls and borrowed them years ago to make copies. The patterns were even then reproduced in a magazine for the W. I. There would be some interesting copies around, although of a different size to the originals.

To think that grandmother almost threw them out with the rubbish!”

**Anne was baptized Annelies Marie Frank and her name appears as either Ann or Anne.

Jackie Wyartt