The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(17)
Miep remembered the morning Otto had asked for her help. He had come to the office wearing a yellow star affixed to his coat. Everyone had pretended it was not there. She recalled his phrasing: “Are you willing to take on the responsibility of taking care of us while we are in hiding?” In a practical sense that would mean shopping for the family, obtaining forged ration cards or buying them on the black market, finding food.
“Of course,” she replied.
She added, “There is a look between two people once or twice in a lifetime that cannot be described by words. That look passed between us. . . . I asked no further questions. . . . I felt no curiosity. I had given my word.”6
Jews were forbidden to take furniture out of their houses or transport household goods through the streets. Johannes Kleiman’s brother Willy owned a pest extermination company called Cimex and, knowing of Otto’s plan to hide, offered the use of his truck to transport the Franks’ possessions—furniture, rugs, canned food, beds, and clothing—to Kleiman’s apartment, from which they would be taken to the Annex. Of course, it was done quietly on a Saturday or Sunday evening or late at night, so that it took months to transport everything.7 Few knew that it was happening, certainly not the Frank children. They were told that the furniture was being sent out for repair, which some visitors thought a ridiculous indulgence in wartime.
On July 5, 1942, an official letter with an ornate Nazi swastika was delivered to the Frank home. It was an order for sixteen-year-old Margot Frank to report for Arbeitseinsatz, compulsory work duty in Germany. She was advised to bring a suitcase with winter things. For Miep, conscripting a sixteen-year-old girl for forced labor was a “new abomination the Germans were inflicting on the Jews.”8 In fact, it was a subterfuge. For a Jewish child, the end of the journey would be death. With the assistance of Miep and her husband, Jan, Otto immediately activated his escape plan. The family left for the Annex the next morning.
Five months earlier, on January 29, Edith’s mother, who had been living with them, had died of cancer after months of suffering. It was a tragic loss that had cut deeply, but now it was also a relief. How could Rosa Holl?nder, ill as she was, have gone into hiding? Edith and Otto would certainly not have been able to leave her behind, but if Edith had decided to stay with her mother, they would both have been deported and forced to endure unimaginable horrors. The Germans spoke of the Jewish deportations as “emigration” or “resettlement” and made already deported Dutch Jews write postcards to their families saying positive things about the camps. But people managed to transmit secret messages. A salutation such as “Give my regards to Ellen de Groot,” using a common Dutch name, got past the censors. In Dutch, ellende means “misery” and groot means “great.”9
Three months before they went into hiding, Otto had rented out the large room on the upper floor of their apartment to Werner Goldschmidt, a German refugee who had come to the Netherlands in 1936. His presence was fortuitous, or perhaps, given Otto’s shrewdness, it was part of his plan for hiding his family. When they left their home for the last time, Otto left behind, as though inadvertently, an address on a piece of paper that gave the impression that the family had fled to Switzerland. Soon, thanks in part to Goldschmidt, the rumor spread through the neighborhood that the Franks had managed to escape.
Four other people joined the Frank family. The first to arrive were the Van Pels family of three. Hermann van Pels had been working with Otto from 1938 as an expert in spices. They lived just behind the Franks’ apartment in the River Quarter and had become close friends. Otto said he thought that sharing the Annex with the Van Pelses would make life less dreary. Then the dentist Fritz Pfeffer spoke to Miep when she went to him for an appointment and asked her if she knew somewhere safe to hide. She talked to Otto. He must have thought, This is Miep asking, so he said that there was not much difference between seven people and eight. But he had to have known that it would increase the risk.10 Finding food for eight and monitoring all noise would certainly be harder. But most difficult was that the sleeping arrangements would have to be reorganized to accommodate Pfeffer. Otto and Edith must have discussed this. It was impossible for them to allow sixteen-year-old Margot to sleep in a bedroom with an older man. When Pfeffer moved into the Annex on November 16, Margot joined her parents in their room, which left thirteen-year-old Anne sleeping in the same room as Pfeffer.
One cannot imagine Edith or Otto being comfortable with the arrangement, but their lives and their capacity for control had changed so much. The choice confronting Otto was always one between life and death. How could he not save Pfeffer? If Otto ever expressed regret that he’d invited the others, thereby putting his family at greater risk of exposure, there is no record of it.
When it came time to hide the Franks, none of Otto’s four employees hesitated. What made it possible for those four people to put their lives on the line and hide Jews? Miep put it best for all of them: it never occurred to her to say no.11
In the end at least eight people knew the secret of the Annex: the four employees; Miep’s husband, Jan; Bep’s father, Johannes; Kleiman’s wife, Johanna; and Kleiman’s brother Willy, who became the Annex’s repairman. Otto came up with the idea of disguising the door to the Annex by putting a bookcase in front of it, which would be on wheels and therefore movable. Johannes Voskuijl, a masterful carpenter, built the bookcase at his home and, to avoid drawing attention to it, brought it piece by piece to the Annex, where he reassembled it.12