The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(23)

Kleiman remembered that before they were separated, Otto had remarked to him, “To think that you are sitting here among us, that we are to blame,” to which Kleiman had replied, “It was up to me, and I wouldn’t have done it differently.”32 After spending four nights in a prison in the city center, the eight were transported to the Westerbork transit camp; Kugler and Kleiman were sent to the Dutch labor camp at Amersfoort.

For the SD sergeant major and his Dutch collaborators, there were Jews hiding at Prinsengracht 263. Hiding, according to the Nazis, was a crime. When they arrested them, Silberbauer and his henchmen knew what their fate would likely be; by that time they were aware of the extermination camps, but they were following orders. Perhaps it’s just the human capacity to objectify another individual, abdicating all responsibility for his or her mortal destiny, that makes it possible to kill so easily.





13


Camp Westerbork


The evening of the arrest, Miep entered the Annex with her husband and the warehouse manager, Willem van Maaren. The shadow of SD officer Karl Silberbauer loomed over everything. He’d warned her not to disappear because he intended to return. In an interview years later, Miep recalled the fear she’d felt but said she’d had to visit the Annex to convince herself that the people they’d been hiding for 761 days were really gone: “Drawers were open, things strewn all over the floor. Everywhere objects were overturned.”1 In the midst of the chaos on the floor she saw a familiar object: the red-and-white-checkered diary with the brass lock in which she’d so often seen Anne writing. After Anne had filled its pages with her dense handwritten entries and the occasional photo, she’d asked Miep to bring her another, but there had been no diaries for sale anywhere in Amsterdam. Instead, Miep had brought her notebooks, and after Anne had filled those, Bep had given her blue sheets of office tracing paper to write on. Miep leaned down, picked up Anne’s diary and a couple of notebooks, and took them to her office, where she placed them in an unlocked drawer of her desk. To lock the drawer would have drawn suspicion. It was risky to keep the diary, but she wanted to give it back to Anne when she returned. Fortunately, she did not read it. Had she done so, she would have discovered that Anne had used real names in it. To protect everyone, she would have had to destroy it.2

Later that evening, Bep and her boyfriend also visited. She told her younger sister Diny that she’d had to see with her own eyes that the hiders had been taken away.3 “When, all those years, you’ve looked after these people and they’re suddenly torn away, what is there left to say?”4

As was done in the case of all deported Jews, somewhere between August 5 and 10, the Abraham Puls movers, the company that had the contract to collect Jewish possessions, arrived to remove all the hiders’ belongings. Locals called it being gepulst (pulsed) and sometimes even stood outside to watch. Furniture, linen, food, and personal possessions were collected and sold or sent by rail to Germany and farther east to citizens whose homes had been bombed by the Allies. The stripping of Jewish assets led to widespread corruption. Objects taken from houses often disappeared, and many rogue “pulsers” became wealthy in the process.

Bep and Miep ventured up to the Annex after it was emptied and found that the Puls men had left a huge jumble of papers and books discarded as worthless on the attic floor. Bep recognized the blue sheets of office tracing paper she’d given Anne to write on and rescued a bundle tied with string. It was the revision of her original diary that Anne had been working on during the last ten weeks of the hiding. She had hoped to publish it after the war under the title The Secret Annex. She thought it could be a mystery story where you were never sure of the ending until the end.5

After four days’ incarceration in the detention center at the notorious Weteringschans prison, the eight prisoners were transported by truck to Muiderpoort train station for the eighty-mile trip to Camp Westerbork. Among the prisoners traveling with them were two sisters, Rebekka “Lin” and Marianne “Janny” Brilleslijper, whose resistance work had led to their arrest. Janny noticed the Franks immediately: a very worried father, a nervous mother, and two children wearing sports-type clothes and backpacks.6 No one was talking, only watching the city houses disappear into the distance as they were removed from civilization. The sisters would be some of the last to see Anne Frank alive.

Thirteen years later, Otto described that trip to the author Ernst Schnabel. His reference to Anne’s drinking in the natural world that had been denied her for so long is poignant.


We traveled in a regular passenger train. The fact that the door was bolted did not matter very much to us. We were together again, and had been given a little food for the journey. We knew where we were bound but in spite of that it was almost as if we were once again going traveling, or having an outing, and we were actually cheerful. Cheerful, at least, when I compare this journey to our next. In our hearts, of course, we were already anticipating the possibility that we might not remain in Westerbork to the end. We knew about deportation to Poland after all. And we also knew what was happening in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek. But then, were not the Russians already deep in Poland? The war was so far advanced that we could begin to place a little hope in luck. As we rode toward Westerbork, we were hoping our luck would hold. Anne would not move from the window. Outside it was summer. Meadows, stubble fields, and villages flew by. The telephone wires along the right of way curvetted up and down along the windows. It was like freedom. Can you understand that?7