Vince had known about the note from prior readings of the file, but the Cold Case Team had not yet made it a priority in the investigation.2 The A. van den Bergh mentioned in the note was a member of the Jewish Council, which was abolished in September 1943, virtually all of its members shipped off to various concentration camps. Even if Van den Bergh had information about the Annex, he would not have been likely to wait a year to pass it on, and, further, if he’d somehow passed it on before he had been deported, it’s not likely that the SD would have waited eleven months before acting on the tip. Then a search of the Bad Arolsen (ITS) terminal at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum revealed that neither Van den Bergh nor any of his immediate family were listed in any of the concentration camps’ archives. They were never deported or interned in a camp. If Van den Bergh was still living at his old address in Amsterdam, might he have had the opportunity to pass on the list of addresses referred to in the note?
Vince decided that the team needed to pursue both the information in the anonymous note and the provenance of the note itself. Was the text Van Helden wrote out in his report the complete note? Where was the original note or at least the copy Otto said he had made? It certainly wasn’t in the full police file. As for Van den Bergh, Vince fed his name into the AI program, which connected him to a woman who’d been employed as a secretary for the Jewish Council: Mirjam Bolle. She was 101 years old and living in Israel.
Bolle had written a book titled Letters Never Sent, published in English by Yad Vashem in 2014; part of it described her time with the Jewish Council. After he learned of her background, Vince said he thought that if he could interview her, she might offer a unique perspective on how the council functioned. He also wanted to find out more about Van den Bergh, whom, presumably, she’d known personally. Was Van den Bergh very active on the Jewish Council? Did she know what happened to him, which concentration camp he was sent to, whether he survived the war?
Starting in 1938, Bolle, at the time Mirjam Levie, was employed by the Committee for Jewish Refugees. After the Nazi occupation, the committee was incorporated into the Jewish Council and she became a member of the new staff, based partly on her ability to read and write German. Like many of the employees of the council, she ended up in Camp Westerbork and eventually in Bergen-Belsen. She was luckier than Anne and Margot. In June 1944, she was one of the 550 prisoners selected for the onetime prisoner swap of Palestine Jews and was thus gone before the Frank sisters arrived in the camp.
During the war Mirjam wrote letters to her fiancé, Leo Bolle, who’d emigrated to Palestine in 1938. She never sent them, but she was able to hide the letters she’d written in a warehouse in Amsterdam; they were found in 1947 and returned to her. In the letters Mirjam recalled the terrible days and nights within the Jewish Council when the deportation lists were drawn up; the panic, despair, and arguments among members of the council’s staff; and the human suffering that underscored the impossibility of their task. She wrote about the utter chaos in the Expositur, the office responsible for issuing the Sperres, and the intimidating visits of the SD leader Aus der Fünten. She stated that the oversight of the Sperres was a very dark chapter: “The Germans threw us a bone and watched with great pleasure how the Jews fought over it among one another.”
I ended up in the house alone, I cried tremendously, because I knew it was going wrong for us and because I was appalled that the JC [Jewish Council] was used for this butcher’s job once again, instead of saying: it is enough . . . I was . . . crying from anger and rage, but I couldn’t do anything about it.3
Through a contact in Israel the Cold Case Team was able to obtain a telephone number for Mirjam, and Thijs and Vince called her. She apologized for not speaking English very well, even though her command of the language was more than adequate. Her voice was soft yet surprisingly strong for someone her age.
Mirjam told them that her role as a secretary had been quite limited in that she took dictation, sent letters, and sat in on discussions when the first mention of Nazi concentration camps was made. Thijs and Vince asked Mirjam if she recalled the Jewish Council member Arnold van den Bergh. When she answered in the affirmative, the men looked at each other in anticipation. At first she couldn’t remember what he had done on the council because she had not worked for him directly. Only when Vince mentioned that Van den Bergh was a notary did she seem to recall that fact. She did not remember him as being very vocal in the meetings, unlike the cochairmen, Asscher and Cohen. She called Van den Bergh “reserved” and “unassuming.” She asked if they could wait a moment while she retrieved copies of minutes that she still kept from the Jewish Council meetings. They could hear her shuffling papers. Then she came back to the phone and said she could confirm that he’d attended some of the meetings.
Mirjam did not know if Van den Bergh had ever been a prisoner at Camp Westerbork. She did not recall having seen him there before she was put on the train to Bergen-Belsen. Similarly, she did not know if he had ever been in a German concentration camp. Unfortunately, she could not add more to the story since she had not returned to Amsterdam after the war.
If Thijs and Vince wanted to know more about Van den Bergh, they would have to look elsewhere.
36
The Dutch Notary
Arnold van den Bergh was born in 1886 in the Dutch town of Oss, located a little over sixty miles southeast of Amsterdam. He married Auguste Kan, and together they had three daughters, twins Emma and Esther, and a third, Anne-Marie, who happened to be the same age as Anne Frank. Van den Bergh was a notary by profession, one of only seven Jewish notaries operating in Amsterdam prior to the war. He owned one of the largest and most successful notary businesses in the city; his name regularly appeared in newspaper notices involving the sale and transfer of properties. He was wealthy and respected in the Amsterdam Jewish community and was a member of the Committee for Jewish Refugees, a charitable organization headed by David Cohen.
A notary in the Netherlands is quite different from the same functionary in North America or, indeed, in some other European countries. A Dutch notary is an impartial official who is under a strict oath of secrecy, is authorized to draw up authentic documents, called notarial acts, between parties, and ensures that these documents are securely handled and stored. So strict is the oath of secrecy that even a judge is unable to force a notary to reveal the details of his transactions. Notaries are required to be present at and validate transactions related to families (marriage, divorces, wills, and so on), the incorporation of businesses, and transactions of property (mortgages, sales of homes, and so on). A notary is required to ensure that all parties are willing and able to make a sale or transaction legitimate. Being a notary is an esteemed position, and Van den Bergh was at the top of his profession.