The second Anne Frank

Have you heard of Anne Frank? I'm sure you have. She was a Jewish girl whose family fled from Germany to Holland to get away from the Nazis. When the Germans occupied the Netherlands, the Frank family went into hiding in a house in Amsterdam. Anne wrote her now famous diary while they were there. Someone betrayed them to the Nazis. The father escaped capture, but Anne and other members of the family were taken over the border into Germany. They died in a concentration camp. You can learn more and see some of Anne's belongings at the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. It's the city's most frequented tourist attraction. I've been once and must say I was impressed. It's tastefully done. You feel the heaviness of the situation without being taken on a guilt trip.

That was the background. Now for the news. The diary of a 'second Anne Frank' has been discovered in Tilburg, south of Amsterdam. Eighteen-year-old Jewish girl Helga Deen, from Tilburg, wrote it for her fiance in the weeks before she died in a concentration camp. No-one quite knows how she was allowed to do that but the diary did reach her heartbroken fiance. He kept Helga's diaries, along with her pen, a lock of her hair, six letters and something her father had written. Later, he married and had a son. It's that son who has now shown the diary to an employee at the Tilburg Regional Archive who had appealed for people to share their wartime memories.

The discovery comes less than a week after a debate in Holland about whether Anne Frank should be posthumously declared a Dutch citizen. A TV programme wanted to nominate her as one of the most notable Dutch people. Only trouble is that she was originally German and, due to a decree of Hitler's, was stripped of her nationality on fleeing Germany. She once expressed a wish to become a Dutch citizen, we're told. Couldn't we give it to her now? A string of Dutch politicians appeared on TV saying yes, we should. Fortunately, for once, Minister Verdonk who deals with asylum seekers and so on, said quite definitely 'No'.

Sometimes, I really wonder at the Dutch. You're busy locking up asylum seekers and sending them back home and at the same time you're debating in public whether to grant Dutch citizenship - like a Papal blessing - to the dead.

Let Anne and Helga rest in peace. And don't try covering up the truth.