About the razzias which were taking place in different parts of town. I told them the newest edict was for Jewish telephones to be disconnected. That prices for false identity papers had gone through the ceiling. . . .
Every time I pulled the bookcase aside, I had to set a smile on my face, and disguise the bitter feeling that burned in my heart. I would take a breath, pull the bookcase closed, and put on an air of calm and good cheer that it was otherwise impossible to feel anywhere in Amsterdam anymore. My friends upstairs were not to be upset, not to be privy to any of my anguish.9
Johannes Kleiman would occasionally bring his wife to visit on weekends. After the war, he recalled Anne’s desperate curiosity:
Of course, we tried to keep in mind how hard it was for the child. . . . She was hungering for the world outside, for life with other children, and when my wife came up Anne would greet her with an almost unpleasant curiosity. She would ask about Corrie, our daughter. She wanted to know what Corrie was doing, what boyfriends she had, what was happening at the hockey club, whether Corrie had fallen in love. And as she asked she would stand there, thin, in her washed-out clothes, her face snow-white, for they all had not been out of doors for so long. My wife would always bring something for her, a pair of sandals or a piece of cloth; but coupons were so scarce and we did not have enough money to buy on the black market. It would have been so nice if we could have brought her a letter from Corrie occasionally, but Corrie was not allowed to know that the Franks weren’t abroad, as everyone thought, but were still in Amsterdam. We did not want to burden her with this almost unendurable secret.10
Those outside who were devoted to helping the Franks divided the tasks of gathering food between them. Kleiman arranged with a friend who owned the bakery chain W. J. Siemons to deliver bread to the office two or three times a week. To buy food during the occupation, one needed both money and food coupons, which were meant to ensure that goods were distributed evenly. Jan obtained the coupons at first on the black market and then, by mid-1943, through his underground contacts.11 When those were not enough, the baker agreed to be paid in cash after the war. Bread to feed eight could be disguised as bread for the employees, who numbered about nine in total. But of course, the employees who were not in on the secret wondered where all the bread was going.
Miep shopped for the people in the Annex as well as for herself and Jan. That meant going to several shops so as not to be conspicuous. Miep even suggested that it was a kind of theater:
I would go to all the shops and you would try things out a little with the man in the shop. How far could you go. How much could you ask. . . . To what extent you could show compassion. To what extent you could pretend to be in such a terrible situation. Yes, that was like playing in a theatre. At least, that is how I felt about it.12
Hermann van Pels sent Miep to Piet Scholte’s butcher shop off the Rozengracht, owned by his close friend Scholte. He’d been shrewd enough to insist that Miep accompany him there before the hiding so that the butcher would know her face. It had puzzled her at the time, but now she understood. “Go to this man,” she was told. “Give him my list. Say nothing and he’ll give you what we want.” It worked just as promised, without a word spoken.13
Bep was responsible for milk deliveries, which happened daily. Supposedly, the office staff drank a great deal of milk. The milkman asked no questions. But as the food shortages increased—the Germans were sending a lot of Dutch produce back to Germany—Bep would ride her bike out to the farms that surrounded the city to find whatever food she could.
On one occasion on her way back into the city with the few potatoes and vegetables she’d been able to buy, she was stopped by a passing patrol of SS. She made herself understood in German and told the young officer who approached her that she had a large family to feed. He let her go but took half her produce. Then the patrol car caught up with her again, and the officer returned the food.
Bep was sharp enough to know that it was a trap. Instead of heading for the Annex, she went home. The car followed her. She gave the SS her most innocent look and hastened into the house. They drove away.14
Bep and Miep became very close to Anne, as is clear from her diary. Both gave in to her entreaties for them to spend the night in the Annex. Bep described the time spent there as “completely and utterly horrifying.” Lying on a mattress beside Anne, she could hear the bells of the nearby Westerkerk toll every fifteen minutes, shattering the quiet in the rooms:
A beam or a door would creak, then it was something outside on the canal, a gust of wind moving a tree, or a car in the distance coming closer. . . . Each squeak and crack . . . was associated with “I’ve been betrayed” or “they’ve heard me now.”15
The fear was almost insupportable.
Miep also stayed overnight with her husband. After the blackout frames went up, sealing the Annex like a prison with the locks on the inside, Miep and Jan went to bed in Anne’s room. Miep later wrote:
All through the night I heard each ringing of the Westertoren clock. I never slept; I couldn’t close my eyes. I heard the sound of a rainstorm begin, the wind come up. The quietness of the place was overwhelming. The fright of these people who were locked up here was so thick I could feel it pressing down on me. It was like a thread of terror pulled taut. It was so terrible it never let me close my eyes.
For the first time I knew what it was like to be a Jew in hiding.16
11
A Harrowing Incident
Eight people hiding in a small space for twenty-five months—it was amazing that they lasted so long. As Bep put it, “Eight persons are eight individuals. If each one of them committed a single slip each year, that would be sixteen telltale signs.”1 Sometimes domestic arguments broke out during office hours. Bep would recognize the voices and rush to warn the hiders that they could be heard in the warehouse. Once when her father, who was the warehouse manager, heard voices, he started raging at an employee to cover the noise while Bep raced upstairs to keep the peace; the poor worker had no idea what he’d done.2 It was all agonizing.
The world had gone insane, but Otto kept a modicum of calm. Miep noted the change: “I noticed a new composure, a new calm about Mr. Frank. Always a nervous man before, he now displayed a veneer of total control, a feeling of safety and calm emanated from him. I could see that he was setting a calm example for the others.”3
There was need for calm. Up until March 1943, Bep’s father took care of everything. He always made sure to dispose of the trash carefully and covered up any signs that there were hiders in the Annex. However, that June he was diagnosed with cancer. He continued to work for a brief time, but, as Anne wrote in her diary, he had surgery on June 15 and was forced to leave work so he could recuperate.
Unable to find a replacement on his own, Kleiman consulted the public employment office, which sent him a man named Willem van Maaren. It was risky bringing a total stranger into the closed world of the secret Annex, and Kleiman would soon regret his decision. Van Maaren was suspiciously inquisitive, and the helpers would come to believe that he was stealing supplies from the warehouse that he then sold on the black market.