Childhood friend recalls tragic diarist Anne Frank

By Sarah Harvey - for CNN

She told stories, flirted outrageously with boys and was

constantly changing her hairstyle.

Anne Frank hid with her family in a secret room at her father Otto Frank's office in Amsterdam.

It could be the description of almost any young girl growing up in Europe. But this is how Eva Schloss remembers her childhood friend Anne Frank, who had she not died in a Nazi concentration camp, would have celebrated her 80th birthday this week.

Schloss described Frank, whose account of hiding from Jewish persecution in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam is one of the world's mostly widely-read books, as a spunky young schoolgirl with a passion for storytelling that often got her into trouble.

"She got her diary in 1942, so obviously her father knew she was interested in writing and I know she told stories," said Schloss.

"She talked a lot and she was called Mrs Quack Quack. Very often she used to write hundreds of lines [at school] of 'I'm not going to talk so much,' and so on -- but obviously she had a lot to tell."

In some ways the two friends lived parallel lives -- but tragically they had very different outcomes.