When he started the Anne Frank project, Thijs spoke to his father’s best friend to ask him what he remembered about the war. The friend told him to interview ninety-three-year-old Joop Goudsmit, who had stayed with Thijs’s grandparents throughout the war. Goudsmit had become part of the Bayens family and was able to describe the house, the room in the basement where he had hidden, the banned radio concealed under the floorboards in the closet, and the number of Jews who had come through. He said that the risks the Bayenses had taken, including contacts with forgers of identity cards, had been extreme.
It’s baffling to think that Thijs’s father never told him about that, but it was typical. After the war, so many claimed, falsely, to have been involved with the resistance that those who took the real risks, such as Thijs’s grandparents, often preferred to remain silent. But the war had shaped Thijs’s family, and he recognized that the search for what had led to the raid on the secret Annex would enable him to enter the labyrinth of his own family history. Anne Frank’s is an iconic story, but it is also a terrifyingly familiar one, repeated hundreds of thousands of times throughout Europe. Thijs said he also saw it as a warning. “This must never be allowed to happen again,” he said.
Part I
The Background Story
1
The Raid and the Green Policeman
On August 4, 1944, a thirty-three-year-old German SS officer, Karl Josef Silberbauer, a sergeant in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) Referat IV B4, known colloquially as the “Jew-hunting unit,” was sitting in his office on Euterpestraat in Amsterdam when the phone rang. He’d been about to go out for a bite to eat but answered anyway, something he’d later regret. It was his superior officer, Lieutenant Julius Dettmann, also a German, who said he’d just received a phone call claiming that there were Jews hiding in a warehouse complex at Prinsengracht 263 in central Amsterdam. Dettmann did not tell Silberbauer who’d placed the call, but it clearly was someone reliable and well known to the intelligence service of the SS. There had been too many instances of anonymous tips that had proved to be useless or outdated; by the time the Jew-hunting unit arrived, the Jews had moved on. That Dettmann acted directly after the call meant he trusted the source and knew the tip was well worth investigating.
Dettmann phoned Dutch Detective Sergeant Abraham Kaper at the Bureau of Jewish Affairs and ordered him to send several of his men to the Prinsengracht address with Silberbauer. Kaper pulled two Dutch policemen, Gezinus Gringhuis and Willem Grootendorst of the IV B4 unit, into the hunt, along with a third detective.
There are many variations in the accounts of what happened before and after Silberbauer and his men arrived at Prinsengracht 263. The only thing that’s absolutely certain is that they found eight people in hiding: Otto Frank, his wife, Edith, and their two daughters, Anne and Margot; Frank’s colleague and friend Hermann van Pels, his wife, Auguste, and son, Peter; and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer. The Dutch had a term for hiding: onderduiken (diving under).* They’d been diving under for two years and thirty days.
To be imprisoned, even unjustly, is one thing. But it is entirely another to be in hiding. How is it possible to cope for twenty-five months with total incarceration—not to be able to look out a window for fear of being seen; never to walk outside or breathe fresh air; having to remain silent for hours on end so that the workers in the warehouse below would not hear you? The fear had to be extreme to keep to that discipline. Most people would have gone mad.
During those long hours of each workday, whispering an occasional word and tiptoeing while the employees moved below them, what did they do? They studied; they wrote. Otto Frank read history and novels; his favorites were the novels of Charles Dickens. The children studied English, French, and mathematics. Both Anne and Margot kept diaries. They were preparing for life after the war. They still believed in civilization and the future, while outside the Nazis with their accomplices and informants were hunting them.
By the summer of 1944, optimism had spread through the secret Annex. On the wall Otto had pinned a map of Europe and was following the news on the BBC and the Radio Oranje reports of the Dutch government in exile in London. The Germans had confiscated all radios to prevent the Dutch population from listening to foreign news, but Otto had managed to salvage a radio when they had gone into hiding and was now tracking the progress of the Allied forces through the nightly broadcasts. Two months earlier, on June 4, the Allies had captured Rome, followed two days later by D-Day, the largest amphibious invasion in history. By the end of June, the Americans were bogged down in Normandy, but on July 25 they launched Operation Cobra and the German resistance in northwest France collapsed. In the east, the Russians were moving into Poland. On July 20, members of the high command in Berlin had attempted to assassinate Hitler, which brought jubilation to the people in the Annex.
Suddenly it looked as though the war would be over in a matter of weeks, or maybe a few months. Everyone was making plans for what they would do after the war. Margot and Anne began to talk about going back to school.
And then the unimaginable happened. As Otto stated in an interview almost two decades later, “When the Gestapo came in with their guns, that was the end of everything.”1
As the sole survivor among the eight, we have only Otto’s record of what happened from the perspective of the Annex residents. He recalled the arrest in such vivid detail that it was clearly seared in his mind.
It was, he said, around ten thirty. He was upstairs giving Peter van Pels an English grammar lesson. In taking dictation, Peter had misspelled the word “double” using two b’s. He was pointing this out to the boy when he heard someone’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. This was disturbing because at that hour all the residents were very quiet lest they be heard in the offices below. The door opened. A man stood there pointing a gun at them. He was not wearing a police uniform. They raised their hands. They were marched downstairs at gunpoint.2
In his recounting of the raid, we get a sense of Otto’s profound shock. During trauma, time slows and stretches out, and some details are strangely emphasized. Otto remembers a spelling error; a grammar lesson; a creaking stair; a pointed gun.
He remembers he was teaching Peter. He remembers the word that Peter stumbled on—“double”—with only one b. That’s the rule. Otto believes in rules, in order, but a dark force is sweeping up his stairs with the intent to kill him and all he holds most precious. Why? Power, hatred, or simply because it can? Even in retrospect, Otto keeps the overwhelming horror at bay, maintaining his self-control because others depend on him. As he looks at the gun in the plainclothes policeman’s hand, he thinks: The Allies are advancing. Luck, chance, fate, may save them all. But he is wrong. He and his family will be transported in freight cars on the last train to Auschwitz. It is unthinkable, but he also knows the unthinkable can happen.
When Otto and Peter reached the main floor of the Annex, they found everyone else standing with their hands up in the air. There were no hysterics, no weeping, only silence. Everyone is numbed by the shock of what was happening—now, so close to the end.