The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(4)

Karl Silberbauer would later claim that it was years before he learned, by reading it in a newspaper, that among the ten people he’d arrested that day was fifteen-year-old Anne Frank.

When tracked down by an investigative journalist in 1963, Silberbauer said:


The people I took from their hiding places, did not leave an impression on me. It would have been different if it had been a man such as general De Gaulle or some major resistance member or other. Such a thing you don’t forget. If I wasn’t on the clock at the moment my colleague got a call. . . . I would never have come in contact with that Anne Frank. I still remember that I was just about to go out to eat something. And because this whole case blew up after the war, I am the one dealing with the mess. . . . I wonder who is behind all this. Probably that Wiesenthal or someone at the ministry trying to gain the favor of the Jews.6



It is hard to imagine a more despicable, emotionally cauterized response. By now Silberbauer knew very well that “that Anne Frank,” whom he’d arrested on August 4, 1944, had died of starvation and typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It was as if what mattered was not the dead child—she is incidental, not real, her suffering is insignificant—but that he is the victim. How strange that the bully, unmasked, is always awash in self-pity.





2


The Diary of Anne Frank


The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most harrowing books we will read if we read it for what it truly is: a thirteen-year-old girl’s daily account of life in hiding during the terrifying Nazi occupation of her city. Anne Frank catches every detail of the more than two years of claustrophobic life she spent with her family in the Annex attached to her father’s company.

She knows what is out there. Like the other seven people with whom she shares the space, she lives with constant fear, hunger, nightmares of abduction, and the imminent threat of discovery and death. She is not the first to experience this, but she may be one of the first to write about it as it is happening. The other masterpieces we have about the Holocaust—Elie Wiesel’s Night, Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man—are all written in retrospect by people who survived. But Anne Frank will not survive.

And this is what makes reading her diary so harrowing. From the beginning, we know the ending, but Anne Frank does not.

Anne Frank received the diary as a gift for her thirteenth birthday on June 12, 1942. Less than a month later, on July 6, her family went into hiding after her sixteen-year-old sister, Margot, was sent a summons to report for Arbeitseinsatz, compulsory work duty in Germany. Otto Frank already understood that “work duty” was a euphemism for slave labor.

Longing for an intimate companion, Anne Frank invented a friend named Kitty, to whom she writes with complete and utter candor. She writes in her diary about hope, about the mysteries of her female body, about her passionate adolescent crush on the seventeen-year-old boy whose family shared the Annex with the Franks. Anne is still a child: she cuts out images of movie stars and royals and pastes them onto her bedroom wall. Though she was born in Frankfurt, Germany, having arrived in the Netherlands at the age of four and a half, her primary language is now Dutch, the language in which she writes her diary. Her ambition is to become a writer. She dreams of a future when she will be famous. For the reader, all this is shattering since we know that for her, there will be no future.

The world Anne lives in is unrecognizable to us. In July 1943, the family discovers she needs eyeglasses. Miep Gies, one of the helpers of those in the Annex, offers to take her to an ophthalmologist, but Anne is petrified at the thought of stepping out into the street. When she tries to put on her coat, the family discovers she has outgrown it, and that, along with her paleness, would have easily identified her as a Jew in hiding. She does not get the glasses. By August 1944, she will not have walked outside for twenty-five months.

Open windows could alert people in adjacent businesses that the Annex is occupied. To breathe fresh air, the fourteen-year-old Anne must lean down to suck in the bit of air that comes across the windowsill. In her diary she writes that being cooped up in the small rooms is unbelievably claustrophobic, and the silence the hiders must maintain adds a level of terror that never seems to diminish. She finds herself climbing the stairs, up and down, trapped like a caged creature. The only solution is sleep, and even sleep is interrupted by fear.1

But she always rallies. She tells “Kitty” that the way to conquer fear and loneliness is to seek solitude in nature and commune with God—as if, for a moment, sitting in the window of the attic space looking up at the pale sky, she could forget that she cannot leave the Annex. How is it possible that she can be so ebullient, so affirmative, so full of life in the midst of such terrifying repression?

Toward the end of her diary, Anne records a particularly frightening night when thieves break into the warehouse and someone, possibly the police, bangs on the bookcase that camouflages the entrance to the secret Annex.

Anne tells Kitty that she believed she would be killed. When she survived the night, her first impulse was to declare that she would dedicate herself to the things she loved: the Netherlands, the Dutch language, and writing. And she would not be stopped until she fulfilled her purpose.2

It’s an extraordinary declaration for an adolescent just about to turn fifteen. Anne Frank’s last entry in her diary is dated August 1, 1944, three days before she and her family and the others in hiding are arrested. Otto Frank will be the only one of the eight residents of the Annex to return from the camps.