The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(12)
6
An Interlude of Safety
By December 1933, Otto Frank found his family an apartment at 37 Merwedeplein in the River Quarter of Amsterdam. It was a modest three-bedroom, upper-floor apartment in a complex of row houses built around 1920.* The River Quarter was filled with hundreds of newly arrived Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. The poorer Dutch Jews envied their middle-class comfort, while the locals warned the newly arrived not to speak German in public lest they be identified as immigrants. Otto thought he’d found a safe refuge for his family. Anne loved the area, calling the Merwedeplein “the Merry.” For the first five or six years, the Franks felt at home in Amsterdam, and the children were soon integrated into their schools, spoke Dutch, and found friends. What was happening in Germany was tragic but remote.
In the Netherlands at that time, anti-Semitism was not overt. When it did rear its head, it was usually through verbal assaults. But a different kind of intolerance was growing. As refugees fled from Germany, then Austria and Eastern Europe, anti-refugee sentiment began to build slowly among the Dutch. The refugees came to the Netherlands in three waves: first after Hitler’s ascendance to power in 1933; then with the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935; and finally, after Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, in 1938, when Jewish shops were vandalized and an estimated thirty thousand Jews were arrested and six hundred seriously wounded. Accused of inciting the violence, the Jews were fined millions of marks as punishment. When truth could be so distorted, it was time to flee. Between 1933 and 1940, an estimated thirty-three thousand refugees entered the Netherlands.
The Dutch government voted to treat the refugees as “undesirable elements.”1 In 1939, Camp Westerbork was set up to house both legal and illegal Jewish refugees, and private Dutch Jewish organizations were forced to finance it. Located in a remote northeast corner of the country (Queen Wilhelmina had vetoed a more central location that she felt was too close to a royal residence), the camp was made up of crude barracks and small huts. Initially, it was an open camp where people were supposedly being prepared for emigration. Eventually, Westerbork was ready and waiting for the German occupiers to convert it into a transit camp for Jews en route to the concentration camps in the east.
In the midst of all that, Otto Frank managed to establish his Opekta business with a loan from his brother-in-law, Erich Elias. The profits were slim, but by 1938 he formed a second company, Pectacon, specializing in herbs, spices, and seasonings to sell to butchers and other tradespeople, which meant he could carry on business in the winter months, when the fruit used to make jam was scarce. He’d tried to establish a branch in England, traveling to London and Bristol in October 1937, which of course might have meant his family’s eventual emigration to England and freedom, but the plan had fallen through.
Looking back at the family’s first years in the Netherlands, Otto could say that after the horrors in Germany, they had recovered their freedom and life had been peaceful. In the summers Edith and the children often traveled to the spa city of Aachen just inside the German border, where her family had rented a large town house in 1932. It was there that she and her children stayed for four months while Otto found them the apartment in Amsterdam. Otto also took the children to Basel to visit his mother, Alice, and his sister, Leni, along with the extended family of cousins.
The measure of Otto as a businessman and a person can be seen in his relationship with his staff. It’s hard to imagine workers who were asked to sacrifice more in support of their boss and who gave more freely than the four people employed by Otto Frank: Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl.
Otto had known Johannes Kleiman since 1923; they’d met when Otto had been attempting to set up a branch of the Michael Frank & Sons bank in Amsterdam. Kleiman had Otto’s total confidence. When Jews were forbidden to own businesses in 1941, Otto passed the running of Pectacon to Kleiman to prevent its being confiscated or liquidated by the Germans. It would eventually be renamed Gies & Co. to give it a Dutch pedigree. When Otto and his family went into hiding, Kleiman cooked the books in such a way as to hide the money he always set aside for Otto as the company’s true president.
Victor Kugler had served in World War I with the Austro-Hungarian Navy and had been wounded. He had moved to the Netherlands in 1920 and been one of Otto’s first employees, joining Opekta in 1933. Kugler shared Otto’s politics, telling Otto that he’d left Austria in 1920 because “he was disgusted with the fascism and anti-Semitism he encountered regularly in the Austrian imperial armed forces during the war.”2 He was thirty-three years old and married to a woman in serious ill health. Miep Gies described him as “a husky, good-looking man, dark haired and precise. He was always serious, never joked . . . always quite formal and polite.”3 What she didn’t know was that he’d had a complicated childhood, born to an unwed mother in a small town where being labeled illegitimate was painful, which may have accounted for his reserve.
Miep Gies, born in 1909, was also Austrian. Food shortages were so extreme in Austria after World War I that many children, including Miep, suffered from severe malnutrition. As her condition worsened, her parents enrolled her in a program through which starving children were sent to the Netherlands to recover. The children traveled alone by train, an identification card with their name hung around their necks. Miep remembered the train stopping in pitch darkness in the Dutch town of Leiden. A man took her by the hand, and they walked away from the station out of the town. Suddenly there was a house. A door opened; a woman greeted her with warm milk. Children stared. She was taken to bed and immediately fell asleep. She formed a deep bond with the Nieuwenburg family, with whom she stayed for five years. During a visit to Vienna when she was sixteen, she asked her birth parents to consent to her remaining with her adoptive Dutch family.4 Such a personal history gave her a profound compassion for refugees.