Otto was told that he had been lucky to survive. But what was luck? He had lost everything. He kept sane by trying to rebuild his spice business, which proved to be impossible since spices from Indonesia were no longer available, and by helping to reunite orphaned children with their relatives.
He wrote his mother that he’d visited Jetteke Frijda, Margot’s school friend from the Jewish Lyceum, which they’d attended together after Jewish children had been banned from Dutch public schools. Jetteke was all alone. Her father and brother were dead. Her mother was in Switzerland.11 There was such overwhelming need; sometimes it was too much. Yet he did what he could to help.
“He became my father from there on; he took care of everything,” Hanneli Goslar, another orphan, said of Otto Frank.12 Her parents had been friends of the Franks in Amsterdam, and she had been one of Anne’s closest friends at school. Her mother had died in childbirth in 1942, and her father and maternal grandparents had been murdered in Bergen-Belsen.
She’d met Anne several times in Bergen-Belsen. Believing that her father had been gassed right away, Anne had stood at the barbed-wire fence that separated them and cried, “I don’t have any parents anymore.” Hanneli had lost contact with Anne when she and her younger sister had been transported to Theresienstadt. They had been on the Red Cross’s Palestine list, supposedly available to be used as “trade goods” in exchange for German prisoners of war. They had never reached the camp. Fortunately, their train had been liberated by the Russians en route.13
Otto had seen the Goslar sisters’ names on a Red Cross list of survivors and searched for them in Maastricht, where Hanneli was in the hospital. Thrilled to see that Otto wasn’t dead, the moment she saw him Hanneli blurted out, “Mr. Frank! . . . Your daughter is alive.”14 Then he told her the awful truth. It crossed her mind that had Anne known Otto was alive, she might have found the will to survive.
Otto took the girls under his wing, moving Hanneli to a hospital in Amsterdam and then arranging the necessary papers for her and her sister to travel to Switzerland to live with an uncle, even accompanying them to the airport. He could imagine the gulf of terror that could open for orphans alone.15
The last image we have of Anne Frank comes from Hanneli Goslar. She is watching Anne through the barbed-wire fence in Bergen-Belsen. “It wasn’t the same Anne. She was a broken girl. I probably was too, but it was so terrible.”16 It was February. It was cold. Anne had thrown off her clothes because she could no longer tolerate the lice. She stood naked except for a blanket covering her shoulders. Her mother and sister were dead. She believed her father was dead, too. She was delirious with typhus. She would be dead within a few days.17
Another survivor of Bergen-Belsen, a young girl who knew Anne, commented, “There it took superhuman effort to remain alive. Typhus and debilitation—well, yes. But I feel certain that Anne died of her sister’s death. Dying is so frightfully easy for anyone left alone in a concentration camp.”18
15
The Collaborators
At the end of the war, at least 11 million refugees were on the move. It was expected that a quarter of a million Dutch forced laborers would be returning to the Netherlands, and their numbers would swell with the foreign refugees seeking asylum. The Dutch government in exile in London had been preparing since 1943 to receive six hundred thousand people, among whom would be seventy thousand Jews. Borders would have to be secured and systems devised to scrutinize legitimate returnees, who would need to obtain medical, security, and customs clearance. No one wanted Communists sneaking in and destabilizing the country.1
As it turned out, officials had wildly overestimated the number of Jewish returnees. Only 5,200 Jews survived the camps and made their way back to the Netherlands. Tragically, they were treated badly. The returning Jewish survivors were denied public assistance and told to apply to international Jewish organizations for financial help. After the final deportations from Camp Westerbork in September 1944, about five hundred Jews had been left behind, while over the winter months that number had swelled to 896. Though the camp had at last been liberated by the Canadians on April 12, 1945, those people had been kept imprisoned and forced to share the facility with the roughly ten thousand newly arrested NSB members who’d been their tormentors.2 Only on June 23 had the Dutch military authorities allowed all former inmates to leave.
Female concentration camp survivors whose heads had been shaved in the camps often found themselves misidentified as collaborators and humiliated. Returning Jews discovered that other people were living in their houses or their homes had been robbed, and some even received tax demands to cover the years they had been in the camps. It was blamed on the postwar chaos, but it was traumatizing.
It should be added that the Dutch authorities were not alone in this. When a US intergovernmental committee commissioned a report on US-run displaced persons (DP) camps, they found Holocaust survivors in horrific conditions, poorly fed, and under armed guard.
The Dutch government in exile annulled Nazi legislation that had removed Jews from commerce. That should have been good news for Otto, but he was now classified as a German national and his businesses fell under the Decree on Hostile Property. He was forced to prove that he had never behaved in an anti-Dutch manner. In February 1947, twenty-one months after he had returned from Auschwitz, he was informed that he was no longer considered “a hostile subject.”3 At least he had had Miep and Jan to house him and friends who had supplied letters of support. As he wrote to his brother Robert, some survivors who couldn’t prove they had means of support had been put into camps or not allowed to reenter the country.
Dutch civilians were not more welcoming. They’d had their own suffering. The last winter of the war, called the “Hunger Winter,” had been brutal. The Dutch government in exile had ordered the railway workers to go on strike in sympathy with the Allies. In retaliation, the Germans had cut off all food and heating supplies. Over the Hunger Winter, between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand Dutch people had starved to death. As it retreated, the German Army opened the dikes, flooding 8 percent of the landmass, and its systematic looting meant that the economic destruction in the Netherlands was greater than in any other western country.4 Many Dutch dismissed the stories of the extermination camps in the east as an exaggeration. The truth, at least at that stage, was that many did not realize that there had been a Holocaust. As Miep Gies put it sadly, “Everyone had been through so much misery that no one had much interest in the suffering of others.”5
Meanwhile, the Dutch government in exile directed much of its attention to collaborators. Because it expected acts of vengeance against those known to have conspired with the Nazis, it set about identifying the collaborators so they could be prosecuted legally. In 1943, it drew up the Special Justice Act (Besluit Buitengewone Rechtspleging), and then, starting in May 1945, it established a series of tribunals and special courts throughout the country. In the newly liberated Netherlands, the Political Investigation Service (POD) looked into hundreds of thousands of cases.*