The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(86)
The message to take from Anne’s story is to stop prejudice and discrimination right at its beginning. Prejudice starts when we speak about THE Jews, THE Arabs, THE Asians, THE Mexicans, THE Blacks, THE Whites. This leads to the feeling that all members of each such group think and act the same.4
Miep died in 2010 at the age of one hundred.
After the publication of Anne’s diary in 1947, Johannes Kleiman regularly took journalists and visitors on guided tours of the secret Annex. Even after Otto moved to Switzerland, Kleiman held power of attorney for him and functioned almost as Otto’s private secretary, particularly in his dealings with publishers of Anne’s diary. He was deeply involved in the restoration of the Anne Frank House and in 1957 became a member of the board of the Anne Frank Foundation, although he didn’t live to see the opening of the museum. He died of a stroke in his office on January 30, 1959. He was sixty-three years old.
Victor Kugler’s wife, who had been ill for a long time, died in 1952. Three years later, he married again and moved to Toronto, where his second wife’s family lived. He died in Toronto in 1989 at the age of eighty-one. The book about him with the unfortunate title The Man Who Hid Anne Frank (it is clear that he was not the only helper) was published in 2008 after both his and Otto’s deaths.
Bep Voskuijl married in 1946 and had four children. She never lost contact with Otto, visiting him every week when he was still in Amsterdam and three times a year after he moved to Switzerland. She was always reticent about the war years and her role as a helper and gave few interviews. She met Queen Juliana at the Dutch premiere of the film The Diary of Anne Frank by George Stevens, but in a letter to Otto, she admitted that she found it all uncomfortable. She wanted to support what she called “the symbol of the idealized Anne,” but it always brought back the pain of what she’d witnessed. “This great pain never leaves my heart,” she said.5
Everyone who knew Bep remarked that the “once cheerful young woman” always struggled to maintain her balance, unable to accept the deaths of the Annex residents.6 She died in Amsterdam of an aortic rupture in 1983 at the age of sixty-three.
At Otto’s request, in 1972 the four helpers were awarded the Yad Vashem honorary title of Righteous Under the Nations, including Johannes Kleiman, who was acknowledged posthumously.
Otto Frank was determined to be a survivor and not a victim. To be a victim was to give the victory to the Nazis. But tellingly, he never watched a single performance of the play or film based on Anne’s diary. According to his stepdaughter, Eva, “He couldn’t bear the thought that actresses would be saying the words he once heard Anne and Margot speak, pretending to be the children that he would never see again.”7
He despised generalizations. Proud of his German heritage, he did not accept the idea of collective guilt. He spent extra time replying to letters from German schoolchildren, wanting them to learn what had happened during the war. As Otto Frank’s biographer recorded, in 1952, 88 percent of Germans “said they felt no personal responsibility for the mass exterminations.”8 It would only be the next generation who would confront what actually happened in Germany that gave license to the murderousness of Hitler and the Nazis.
Otto knew that his daughter was a symbol for the millions—both Jews and non-Jews—who had been murdered. Her diary and the secret Annex stood in his mind as both a warning from the past and a source of hope.9 He wanted people to remember so it wouldn’t happen again. He wanted them to know that fascism builds slowly and then one day it is an iron wall that looms and cannot be circumvented. He wanted them to know what can be lost and how fast it can happen.
One can imagine Otto Frank walking the streets of Amsterdam alone in June 1945. How was it possible that the place could still exist when everything he had was gone: his wife, his daughters, his home, his business? He told his mother he was walking in a strange dream and was not yet normal.
Amsterdam today is a city of memory. With eighty monuments to the war, memory is part of the fabric of the present, immediately accessible. You can take a tour of the shadow city, beginning at the Anne Frank House. The bookcase, so indelible in your mind, is as heavy and imposing as you’d imagined. The stairs up to the Annex are steep. The space is so much smaller than you’d thought. In this claustrophobic place, it is impossible not to imagine the fear of occupation.
Next you can go to the infamous Jewish Theater. It is only a facade now. The original interior has been gutted, and one wall now bears a list in bronze of more 6,700 Jewish families who were deported from that location. Each day hundreds of prisoners were crammed into the small space, awaiting transport to Westerbork and then on to one of the extermination camps. People were taken to the station by tram, by truck, or on foot, always at night so there would be few eyewitnesses.
On the second floor of the theater is an interactive map of Bergen-Belsen. When I was there, I watched an elderly man step forward and point to a list. He told the friends who surrounded him that he was number 29: “Unbekannter Jude [unknown Jew]. Hamburger? Alfred?” Fifty children were found hiding with Gentiles, and the Nazis weren’t sure that they were Jews. On September 13, 1944, they were transported from Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen. Two months later, they were deported to Theresienstadt. Forty-nine of the children survived, including the man beside me. “What was it like?” his friends asked. “I was four years old. I don’t remember,” he replied.