The evening of the arrest, Miep entered the Annex with her husband and the warehouse manager, Willem van Maaren. The shadow of SD officer Karl Silberbauer loomed over everything. He’d warned her not to disappear because he intended to return. In an interview years later, Miep recalled the fear she’d felt but said she’d had to visit the Annex to convince herself that the people they’d been hiding for 761 days were really gone: “Drawers were open, things strewn all over the floor. Everywhere objects were overturned.”1 In the midst of the chaos on the floor she saw a familiar object: the red-and-white-checkered diary with the brass lock in which she’d so often seen Anne writing. After Anne had filled its pages with her dense handwritten entries and the occasional photo, she’d asked Miep to bring her another, but there had been no diaries for sale anywhere in Amsterdam. Instead, Miep had brought her notebooks, and after Anne had filled those, Bep had given her blue sheets of office tracing paper to write on. Miep leaned down, picked up Anne’s diary and a couple of notebooks, and took them to her office, where she placed them in an unlocked drawer of her desk. To lock the drawer would have drawn suspicion. It was risky to keep the diary, but she wanted to give it back to Anne when she returned. Fortunately, she did not read it. Had she done so, she would have discovered that Anne had used real names in it. To protect everyone, she would have had to destroy it.2
Later that evening, Bep and her boyfriend also visited. She told her younger sister Diny that she’d had to see with her own eyes that the hiders had been taken away.3 “When, all those years, you’ve looked after these people and they’re suddenly torn away, what is there left to say?”4
As was done in the case of all deported Jews, somewhere between August 5 and 10, the Abraham Puls movers, the company that had the contract to collect Jewish possessions, arrived to remove all the hiders’ belongings. Locals called it being gepulst (pulsed) and sometimes even stood outside to watch. Furniture, linen, food, and personal possessions were collected and sold or sent by rail to Germany and farther east to citizens whose homes had been bombed by the Allies. The stripping of Jewish assets led to widespread corruption. Objects taken from houses often disappeared, and many rogue “pulsers” became wealthy in the process.
Bep and Miep ventured up to the Annex after it was emptied and found that the Puls men had left a huge jumble of papers and books discarded as worthless on the attic floor. Bep recognized the blue sheets of office tracing paper she’d given Anne to write on and rescued a bundle tied with string. It was the revision of her original diary that Anne had been working on during the last ten weeks of the hiding. She had hoped to publish it after the war under the title The Secret Annex. She thought it could be a mystery story where you were never sure of the ending until the end.5
After four days’ incarceration in the detention center at the notorious Weteringschans prison, the eight prisoners were transported by truck to Muiderpoort train station for the eighty-mile trip to Camp Westerbork. Among the prisoners traveling with them were two sisters, Rebekka “Lin” and Marianne “Janny” Brilleslijper, whose resistance work had led to their arrest. Janny noticed the Franks immediately: a very worried father, a nervous mother, and two children wearing sports-type clothes and backpacks.6 No one was talking, only watching the city houses disappear into the distance as they were removed from civilization. The sisters would be some of the last to see Anne Frank alive.
Thirteen years later, Otto described that trip to the author Ernst Schnabel. His reference to Anne’s drinking in the natural world that had been denied her for so long is poignant.
We traveled in a regular passenger train. The fact that the door was bolted did not matter very much to us. We were together again, and had been given a little food for the journey. We knew where we were bound but in spite of that it was almost as if we were once again going traveling, or having an outing, and we were actually cheerful. Cheerful, at least, when I compare this journey to our next. In our hearts, of course, we were already anticipating the possibility that we might not remain in Westerbork to the end. We knew about deportation to Poland after all. And we also knew what was happening in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek. But then, were not the Russians already deep in Poland? The war was so far advanced that we could begin to place a little hope in luck. As we rode toward Westerbork, we were hoping our luck would hold. Anne would not move from the window. Outside it was summer. Meadows, stubble fields, and villages flew by. The telephone wires along the right of way curvetted up and down along the windows. It was like freedom. Can you understand that?7
Word traveled through Westerbork whenever a new transport arrived, bringing both hope and despair: hope that it might not be family or relatives who’d been betrayed and whose presence would double one’s pain; despair that the transports were still leaving Amsterdam regularly and that, despite the Allied advances, the war had not yet ended.
A woman named Mrs. Rosa “Rootje” de Winter was watching the new arrivals with her fifteen-year-old daughter. Suddenly she shouted, “Judy, see!” Eight people were standing in the long line waiting for the clerks to register their names. Mrs. de Winter noted their pale skin: “You could tell at once that they had been hiding and had not been in the open air for years.”8 One of them was Anne Frank. Her daughter and Anne would become friends in that desolate place.
Arrival was scripted: first the quarantine barracks, where an employee of the Lippmann-Rosenthal bank confiscated any remaining valuables, then assignment to Barrack 67, the punishment barrack for criminals, since hiding was a criminal offense. Three hundred people were living in each barrack. The new arrivals were handed blue uniforms with a red bib and wooden clogs. The men’s heads were shaved; the women’s hair was cut painfully short.
In her diary, Anne shared that her only vanity was her beautiful hair. But the Germans required hair for power belting and pipe joint packing in U-boats.9 It was the universe gone mad: the hair of the people whose existence the Nazis were annihilating was used in the manufacture of weapons of war.
Westerbork was located in an area of peat bogs that lent dampness to everything. The camp was not large, about five hundred square meters. It was run in part by German Jewish prisoners called the Order Service (Ordedienst; OD), who served as a kind of police force. They were refugees whom the Dutch had confined in the camp in 1939, when the Netherlands was still neutral. Later, Dutch Jews had joined their numbers. The Germans assured the members of the OD that if they enforced authority within the camp, they themselves would not be transported to “the east.” They varied in number between forty and sixty men and reported directly to the camp commanders.10
For Anne, ironically, Westerbork provided a kind of freedom after the incarceration in the Annex. Mrs. de Winter recalled, “Anne was happy; it was as if she were liberated, for now she could see new people and talk to them, and could laugh.” She could breathe and feel the sun on her face. “Although we weren’t in safety nor at the end of our misery,” Mrs. de Winter added.11