Four other people joined the Frank family. The first to arrive were the Van Pels family of three. Hermann van Pels had been working with Otto from 1938 as an expert in spices. They lived just behind the Franks’ apartment in the River Quarter and had become close friends. Otto said he thought that sharing the Annex with the Van Pelses would make life less dreary. Then the dentist Fritz Pfeffer spoke to Miep when she went to him for an appointment and asked her if she knew somewhere safe to hide. She talked to Otto. He must have thought, This is Miep asking, so he said that there was not much difference between seven people and eight. But he had to have known that it would increase the risk.10 Finding food for eight and monitoring all noise would certainly be harder. But most difficult was that the sleeping arrangements would have to be reorganized to accommodate Pfeffer. Otto and Edith must have discussed this. It was impossible for them to allow sixteen-year-old Margot to sleep in a bedroom with an older man. When Pfeffer moved into the Annex on November 16, Margot joined her parents in their room, which left thirteen-year-old Anne sleeping in the same room as Pfeffer.
One cannot imagine Edith or Otto being comfortable with the arrangement, but their lives and their capacity for control had changed so much. The choice confronting Otto was always one between life and death. How could he not save Pfeffer? If Otto ever expressed regret that he’d invited the others, thereby putting his family at greater risk of exposure, there is no record of it.
When it came time to hide the Franks, none of Otto’s four employees hesitated. What made it possible for those four people to put their lives on the line and hide Jews? Miep put it best for all of them: it never occurred to her to say no.11
In the end at least eight people knew the secret of the Annex: the four employees; Miep’s husband, Jan; Bep’s father, Johannes; Kleiman’s wife, Johanna; and Kleiman’s brother Willy, who became the Annex’s repairman. Otto came up with the idea of disguising the door to the Annex by putting a bookcase in front of it, which would be on wheels and therefore movable. Johannes Voskuijl, a masterful carpenter, built the bookcase at his home and, to avoid drawing attention to it, brought it piece by piece to the Annex, where he reassembled it.12
Miep and Margot rode their bicycles to the Annex the morning of June 6. Otto, Edith, and Anne soon followed on foot. The long walk from their apartment at 37 Merwedeplein in the River Quarter to Prinsengracht in central Amsterdam was exhausting, particularly because they were wearing multiple layers of clothing. A Jew carrying a suitcase would arouse suspicion. But it was raining fiercely, a consolation since the Nazis would not be out checking for Jews in such weather.
As Miep left the Frank family to settle in, she described closing the door to the Annex behind her:
I couldn’t begin to imagine what they must be feeling to have walked away from everything they owned in the world—their home; a lifetime of gathered possessions; Anne’s little cat, Moortje. Keepsakes from the past. And friends.
They had simply closed the door of their lives and had vanished from Amsterdam. Mrs. Frank’s face said it all. Quickly, I left them.13
10
You Were Asked. You Said Yes.
In her diary, Anne Frank offers a poignant description of living, in effect, imprisoned in the Annex. Messages of dread penetrated its walls. Sometimes she could hear jackboots ringing against the pavement in sinister rhythm as German soldiers marched by. Once she described peeking through the curtains in the office after the staff had gone home and seeing Jewish people scuttling past in fear. In the evenings, as the war progressed, RAF planes would fly over the Netherlands on their way to Germany, and the humming sound of their engines and the boom of the antiaircraft guns were frightening.* Often USAF Mustang fighters dumped empty fuel tanks over the city to gain speed and maneuverability. The unexpected noise of unexploded shells and shrapnel falling from the skies and hitting the ground was continual.
On the streets of Amsterdam there was a different kind of fear. Miep described it:
Recently the Green Police and SS had been making surprise razzias during the day. This was the best time to catch the most defenseless Jews at home: the old, the sick, small children. Many had taken to the streets so as not to be in their homes if the Germans came for them. They often asked passersby if they’d seen any sign of a roundup or soldiers, and, if so, where.
It was not hard to see what was going on, but after the brutal German reprisals against the railway strikers, fear pervaded everyone. Most people looked away. They knew they had “to be prudent.” However much they wanted to help, they went inside and shut their doors.1
One of the most eloquent testimonies of life outside the Annex comes from Miep, but it took her forty-two years of reticence before she could speak of the events, so painful was her sense of loss and failure. According to her son, it was a wound that couldn’t heal.
She recalled that in the early days of the occupation, before the Frank family went into hiding, Otto had been forced not only to Aryanize his businesses but also to let his only Jewish employee, Esther, go.
I remember Esther said good-bye to us. She had to leave because she was Jewish. Dismissed. Yes, that’s the way things were. She did not come back, I think. She did not survive the war. She was still there on my wedding day. . . . She gave me a box with a mirror, comb and brush from her and her family. . . . She could not keep it anymore. . . . It was all so painful, you see. You heard about her dismissal but did not talk about it further. You did not know what was going to happen. You gave into that. Had to accept it. The Germans were the boss, and you were scared—-frightened to death.2
Only gradually did the psychology of living under occupation change. When Otto asked the staff for help, their motive to do so was simple: he was their friend, and they had to help. Thus they learned to live in separate worlds, to split themselves into different parts: they were one person in the Annex, another among friends, yet another among officials.3 As Miep explained, you soon learned what to say, what not to say: “We were no longer keeping silent. We had lost the habit of speech. Do you understand the difference?”4
Jan continued to work for the Social Services Authority, but he was soon involved with the NSF resistance group, though after the war ended, he rarely spoke about what he’d done. He did explain his motive when he was asked. What moved a person from passivity to action, he said, was not heroism. It was simpler. You were asked. You said yes. The issue then became whom to trust. “You never really knew who to trust . . . [but] somehow you knew anyway.”
We knew, for example, those people on the other side of the street, they are good. Why? That is hard for us to say. You see things . . . hear things. You hear people talking, and this is how you figure out the value of certain individuals. That is not a one-hundred percent rule but in general it worked for me. I was lucky. . . . You had to be very limited in your contacts. Not speak with the whole neighborhood. And then, of course, you needed a bit of luck, as well. But I have been damned careful in talking about anything, because you could never be sure. And I have actually never been wrong about a person, after all.5
Around that time, Miep and Jan were sheltering a Dutch university student, Kuno van der Horst. They were actually subletting their apartment from Kuno’s mother, who was living in Hilversum, southeast of Amsterdam. His protection was in return for his mother’s hiding a Jewish acquaintance of theirs. They never told Otto Frank about it. It was in another compartment of their lives.
Miep said they found it “logical, “self-evident” that they should help. “You could do something, and you could help these people. They were powerless. . . . That is all—there is nothing more to it.”6
She added, “Yes . . . you were worried sometimes. You would think: ‘How can this go on?’ . . . But the care for these people—and really, the compassion for what these people went through—that was stronger. That won out.”7
Still Miep’s fear did not disappear: “I did not try to stop my husband. I was terrified for him, for I do love him. If I had not loved him, perhaps I could not have endured wondering in terror every single day: Will he come home today?”8
The eight people in the Annex depended on those outside for physical and moral sustenance. They were always eager to know what was happening in the external world, and Miep, Jan, Bep, and the others knew that they could not sugarcoat the truth. “Seeing their hunger, I told them what I knew,” Miep said.