The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(41)
According to the woman, it was a beautiful day. She was hanging out the window of her house looking down into the street when she saw a truck coming from the Rozengracht. It stopped in front of number 263, and from the front of the truck a German officer and a man she recognized as one of Gies & Co.’s warehousemen, Lammert Hartog, stepped out. Some German soldiers and Dutch police leapt from the back of the truck, and the soldiers blocked the road in both directions. Hartog pointed upward at number 263, and the other men entered the building. Sometime later she saw them coming out with the prisoners from the Annex. Lammert Hartog walked over to the other side of the canal and shouted something anti-Semitic at the prisoners. When the truck started moving, she noticed a small group of women standing by the road and spotted Hartog’s wife, Lena. Lena also shouted something anti-Semitic and banged the side of the truck as it drove past.
The woman claimed she had reported what she’d seen to the detective in charge of the 1947 investigation, but since nothing had been done, she had let the matter drop.
In fact, her account was an ingenious fiction contradicted by all witness, suspect, and victim accounts of the raid. The raid party did not arrive in a truck; the street was not cordoned off by soldiers; none of the helpers ever mentioned either of the Hartogs’ anti-Semitic remarks; Jan Gies and Willy Kleiman were watching from the other side of the canal and heard nothing. One can only say that it’s curious how many people want to be part of the Anne Frank story.
23
The Nanny
Though Vince was hoping that people with information about the case might contact them, he was stunned at the number of letters that poured in. The Today show was one of the first to respond to the Cold Case Team’s press release at the end of September 2017. But the team received interview requests from news outlets in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Colombia, Russia, France, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Israel, Italy, and many other countries. And then the Dutch newspaper Het Parool ran a long article on the cold case investigation, which led to further tips from a number of people.1
One of the early tips came from an eighty-two-year-old woman who’d grown up in Jordaan, just a few blocks from Prinsengracht 263. Jansje Teunissen currently lives in a small farming community about two hours south of Amsterdam.* Christine Hoste organized the trip, and she, Monique, and Vince drove together to conduct the interview. It turned out that Christine knew the area well since she’d spent her childhood among its rural farms and her family still lives there. Jansje’s home was a modest single-story dwelling off the rural highway. It was decorated with family photographs and lovely curio cabinets. The interview was filmed and conducted in Dutch, with Monique translating for Vince.
It was obvious that Jansje was nervous, but she soon relaxed as she recounted her numerous stories of Jordaan. A wonderful raconteur, she spoke in long monologues and with excellent recall about the early part of the war, describing the terrifying sound of the air-raid sirens and her father holding her hand as they rushed to the shelter. At least at the outset of the war, there was still plenty of food. Making phone calls was still possible, and the family were fortunate to have a telephone in their home, something usually reserved for businesses or people friendly to the German occupiers. In the summer of 1944, Jansje was sent to live at a boarding school in the small town of Noordwijkerhout, where she would be safer than in the capital.
Jansje told Vince and Monique that her childhood had not been easy. Her father belonged to the NSB, though what that meant she understood only in retrospect. He had a drinking problem; he sometimes made money playing the piano in bars in the area but then would drink away his earnings. She was often left alone during the day because her mother had to support the family by working at a local fish shop. At some point, her parents decided that Jansje should spend her days with a nanny at her residence.
To get there, she would take a short walk down her street to the Prinsengracht, opposite Otto Frank’s business. She would then cross over the canal to where the Westerkerk church stands and onto Westermarkt. It was easy to identify her nanny’s house, Westermarkt 18, since there was a Dutch Nazi poster prominently displayed in the front window.
Her nanny, Berdina van Kampen (nicknamed “Tante Kanjer,” or “Auntie Whopper”) was a childless woman who lived alone with her husband. Jansje always regarded Tante Kanjer as a warm, generous woman who gave her sweets, cookies, and hugs, something she did not often receive at home. The nanny was married to a man Jansje called “Uncle Niek,” a composer who had garnered some notoriety by writing a few popular Dutch songs. She said she was scared of Uncle Niek, but she felt sorry for Tante Kanjer.
Jansje was never allowed into the kitchen at Tante Kanjer’s home.
A self-described “naughty” and “inquisitive” child, she did enter the kitchen once, climbing onto the countertop and seeing a basket with a rope and pulley hidden behind a curtain. Only years later did she realize that her nanny’s home was directly adjacent to the Annex. She wondered if Nanny had been using the rope and basket to lower food down to the people hiding in the Annex. From the window in the kitchen, she could see the courtyard with the tree that Anne described in her diary, and there was a clear view of the Annex behind it.
Vince and the Cold Case Team found Jansje’s story compelling: a fervent NSB member, whose wife was supposedly supplying food to the hiders, living so close to the Annex—that definitely needed to be investigated. The team began to examine the details of the story by querying their massive database to confirm the various names and addresses that Jansje had provided. The results showed that the nanny, Berdina van Kampen–Lafeber, and her husband, Jacobus van Kampen, did indeed live at Westermarkt 18 from May 1940 to February 1945. Uncle Niek was identified as a composer by profession.