The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(68)

During the war Mirjam wrote letters to her fiancé, Leo Bolle, who’d emigrated to Palestine in 1938. She never sent them, but she was able to hide the letters she’d written in a warehouse in Amsterdam; they were found in 1947 and returned to her. In the letters Mirjam recalled the terrible days and nights within the Jewish Council when the deportation lists were drawn up; the panic, despair, and arguments among members of the council’s staff; and the human suffering that underscored the impossibility of their task. She wrote about the utter chaos in the Expositur, the office responsible for issuing the Sperres, and the intimidating visits of the SD leader Aus der Fünten. She stated that the oversight of the Sperres was a very dark chapter: “The Germans threw us a bone and watched with great pleasure how the Jews fought over it among one another.”


I ended up in the house alone, I cried tremendously, because I knew it was going wrong for us and because I was appalled that the JC [Jewish Council] was used for this butcher’s job once again, instead of saying: it is enough . . . I was . . . crying from anger and rage, but I couldn’t do anything about it.3



Through a contact in Israel the Cold Case Team was able to obtain a telephone number for Mirjam, and Thijs and Vince called her. She apologized for not speaking English very well, even though her command of the language was more than adequate. Her voice was soft yet surprisingly strong for someone her age.

Mirjam told them that her role as a secretary had been quite limited in that she took dictation, sent letters, and sat in on discussions when the first mention of Nazi concentration camps was made. Thijs and Vince asked Mirjam if she recalled the Jewish Council member Arnold van den Bergh. When she answered in the affirmative, the men looked at each other in anticipation. At first she couldn’t remember what he had done on the council because she had not worked for him directly. Only when Vince mentioned that Van den Bergh was a notary did she seem to recall that fact. She did not remember him as being very vocal in the meetings, unlike the cochairmen, Asscher and Cohen. She called Van den Bergh “reserved” and “unassuming.” She asked if they could wait a moment while she retrieved copies of minutes that she still kept from the Jewish Council meetings. They could hear her shuffling papers. Then she came back to the phone and said she could confirm that he’d attended some of the meetings.

Mirjam did not know if Van den Bergh had ever been a prisoner at Camp Westerbork. She did not recall having seen him there before she was put on the train to Bergen-Belsen. Similarly, she did not know if he had ever been in a German concentration camp. Unfortunately, she could not add more to the story since she had not returned to Amsterdam after the war.

If Thijs and Vince wanted to know more about Van den Bergh, they would have to look elsewhere.





36


The Dutch Notary


Arnold van den Bergh was born in 1886 in the Dutch town of Oss, located a little over sixty miles southeast of Amsterdam. He married Auguste Kan, and together they had three daughters, twins Emma and Esther, and a third, Anne-Marie, who happened to be the same age as Anne Frank. Van den Bergh was a notary by profession, one of only seven Jewish notaries operating in Amsterdam prior to the war. He owned one of the largest and most successful notary businesses in the city; his name regularly appeared in newspaper notices involving the sale and transfer of properties. He was wealthy and respected in the Amsterdam Jewish community and was a member of the Committee for Jewish Refugees, a charitable organization headed by David Cohen.

A notary in the Netherlands is quite different from the same functionary in North America or, indeed, in some other European countries. A Dutch notary is an impartial official who is under a strict oath of secrecy, is authorized to draw up authentic documents, called notarial acts, between parties, and ensures that these documents are securely handled and stored. So strict is the oath of secrecy that even a judge is unable to force a notary to reveal the details of his transactions. Notaries are required to be present at and validate transactions related to families (marriage, divorces, wills, and so on), the incorporation of businesses, and transactions of property (mortgages, sales of homes, and so on). A notary is required to ensure that all parties are willing and able to make a sale or transaction legitimate. Being a notary is an esteemed position, and Van den Bergh was at the top of his profession.

As the writer of the anonymous note was clearly aware, since the note included the address, Van den Bergh resided in an elegant villa on Oranje Nassaulaan, a street adjacent to the famous 120-acre Vondelpark with its rose garden and Blue Tea House. He seemed to be a quiet but confident man. His wife loved to entertain guests at their home, and he had a passion for fine seventeenth-and eighteenth-century paintings, a luxury that his income afforded him. Not surprisingly, the team discovered that Van den Bergh had been registered as the notary for Goudstikker N.V., a famous Amsterdam art house that dealt in priceless paintings and artworks.

At the beginning of the occupation and prior to the Nazis’ strangling restrictions against the Jewish population, it was business as usual for Van den Bergh, much as Otto Frank’s business was for him. The Cold Case Team located records that showed Van den Bergh still officiating at various transactions in 1940. Several art sales drew the team’s particular scrutiny, not so much for what had been sold as for the prominent Nazis, such as Hermann G?ring, who bought the works.

Van den Bergh’s invitation to become a founding member of the Jewish Council came in early February 1941, probably from David Cohen. Van den Bergh was appointed to the council’s Commission of Five, a committee concerned with the council’s internal organization. In addition to serving as the council’s notary, he attended weekly meetings of its Emigration Department, the group with the unenviable task of compiling the names of Jews who would be placed on the deportation lists. At the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Cold Case Team was able to review the preserved minutes of the Jewish Council, which showed that Amsterdam SD leaders Willy Lages and Ferdinand Aus der Fünten had constant interactions with the council, sometimes even attending its meetings.1