The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(20)

The fear was almost insupportable.

Miep also stayed overnight with her husband. After the blackout frames went up, sealing the Annex like a prison with the locks on the inside, Miep and Jan went to bed in Anne’s room. Miep later wrote:


All through the night I heard each ringing of the Westertoren clock. I never slept; I couldn’t close my eyes. I heard the sound of a rainstorm begin, the wind come up. The quietness of the place was overwhelming. The fright of these people who were locked up here was so thick I could feel it pressing down on me. It was like a thread of terror pulled taut. It was so terrible it never let me close my eyes.

For the first time I knew what it was like to be a Jew in hiding.16





11


A Harrowing Incident


Eight people hiding in a small space for twenty-five months—it was amazing that they lasted so long. As Bep put it, “Eight persons are eight individuals. If each one of them committed a single slip each year, that would be sixteen telltale signs.”1 Sometimes domestic arguments broke out during office hours. Bep would recognize the voices and rush to warn the hiders that they could be heard in the warehouse. Once when her father, who was the warehouse manager, heard voices, he started raging at an employee to cover the noise while Bep raced upstairs to keep the peace; the poor worker had no idea what he’d done.2 It was all agonizing.

The world had gone insane, but Otto kept a modicum of calm. Miep noted the change: “I noticed a new composure, a new calm about Mr. Frank. Always a nervous man before, he now displayed a veneer of total control, a feeling of safety and calm emanated from him. I could see that he was setting a calm example for the others.”3

There was need for calm. Up until March 1943, Bep’s father took care of everything. He always made sure to dispose of the trash carefully and covered up any signs that there were hiders in the Annex. However, that June he was diagnosed with cancer. He continued to work for a brief time, but, as Anne wrote in her diary, he had surgery on June 15 and was forced to leave work so he could recuperate.

Unable to find a replacement on his own, Kleiman consulted the public employment office, which sent him a man named Willem van Maaren. It was risky bringing a total stranger into the closed world of the secret Annex, and Kleiman would soon regret his decision. Van Maaren was suspiciously inquisitive, and the helpers would come to believe that he was stealing supplies from the warehouse that he then sold on the black market.

The change of warehouse manager was probably the most dangerous threat to the Annex residents since they’d gone into hiding, although there were many other things for the helpers to worry about: obtaining food stamps from the resistance (according to Miep, Jan had to take everyone’s identity cards to the resistance organization to prove that he was feeding eight people); finding extra money to buy food; and, as rationing increased, finding food at all.

To make matters worse, businesses all over Amsterdam were being robbed. There were at least three break-in attempts at Prinsengracht 263 between 1943 and 1944. On July 16, 1943, as was his custom, Peter went down to the warehouse before the employees arrived, only to discover that the front doors were open. Thieves had forced both the warehouse and the street doors with a crowbar. Ironically, everyone in the Annex had slept through it all. The robbers had reached the second floor and stolen a small amount of money, blank checks, and, most depressing, food coupons amounting to the Annex’s entire allotment of sugar.

On March 1, 1944, Peter again found the front door leading to the offices wide open and discovered that Mr. Kugler’s new briefcase and a projector were missing from his office. What was worrisome was that there was no sign of a break-in. The burglar seemed to have had a duplicate key, which meant it must have been one of the warehouse employees. Who could it be?

The most harrowing incident was a break-in a month later, on April 9, four short months before the Annex was raided and its residents arrested.4 There had been noises from the warehouse after work hours, and Peter, his father, Fritz, and Otto had headed downstairs. Peter noted that a large panel of the warehouse door was missing. The four entered the warehouse and spied the burglars. Van Pels yelled, “Police!” and the burglars fled. But as the men tried to cover the hole in the door, a swift kick from the outside sent the piece of wood flying. They were shocked at the boldness of the burglars. They tried again, and once more the replacement panel was kicked free. Then a man and a woman shone a flashlight through the hole.

The Annex residents raced upstairs. A little later, they heard a rattling at the bookcase. In her diary Anne wrote that she could not find words to describe the terror of that moment. They heard the footsteps receding, and then everything went quiet. The eight retreated to the top floor, where they spent a sleepless night, waiting for the Gestapo.

The next day, Jan Gies learned what had happened. Martin Sleegers, the local night watchman, who patrolled the area on his bicycle with his dogs, had seen the hole in the door and alerted the police. Sleegers and a policeman named Cornelis den Boef, an active member of the NSB, had searched the entire building, including the alcove containing the entrance to the Annex. It was they who had rattled the bookcase.5

As he was returning to the Annex later that day, Jan ran into the greengrocer Hendrik van Hoeve, who delivered their vegetables, and told him there had been a break-in. Van Hoeve replied that he knew; he and his wife had been walking past the building and had noticed the hole in the door. He’d put his flashlight through the hole and believed he’d startled the burglars, who had run off. He said he’d thought about calling the police but decided against it. He added that he had his own suspicions about what was going on in the Annex and didn’t want to create trouble.6 Van Hoeve was as good as telling Jan that he knew about the people in hiding. Kleiman’s brother Willy soon came to repair the door.