In Willy Lindwer’s documentary, The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, and in the book made from the film, the women who met the Franks at Westerbork recalled seeing the family together. Otto asked Rachel van Amerongen-Frankfoorder, who was assigned to scrub toilets and distribute overalls and clogs to new arrivals, if Anne could work with her, but that proved impossible to arrange. Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper, a Jewish woman who had worked with the Dutch Resistance and who later served as a nurse at Bergen-Belsen, recalled that the Frank girls were among the women who worked scouring the insides of batteries:
That was very messy work, and no one could understand the reason for it. We had to chop open the batteries with a chisel and a hammer and then throw the tar in one basket and the carbon bars, which we had to remove, into another basket; we had to take off the metal caps with a screwdriver, and they went into a third basket. In addition to getting terribly dirty from the work, we all began to cough because it gave off a certain kind of dust.
Another Westerbork prisoner remembered that Anne and Peter were always together, and that Anne, frail and extremely pale at first, came to seem radiant, even happy. Edith Frank appeared stunned and mute; Margot rarely spoke.
Ronnie Goldstein-van Cleef rode with the Frank family on the train from Westerbork to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944, the last transport that would take that route. The Franks agreed that, if they survived, they would try to find each other through Otto’s mother in Basel.
More than a thousand people were on the train. The list of passengers included the Franks, the Van Pelses, and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer, all packed into boxcars. They traveled for three days and two nights before reaching Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, as was customary, they were “selected” according to their age and their level of health and fitness. Over five hundred of the new arrivals went straight to the gas chambers. None of the former residents of the secret annex was among them.
According to camp protocol, men and women were separated, stripped, and sent to be “disinfected.” The hair that Anne was so proud of—and which, according to her girlhood friend, had kept her so busy—was shaved off. Numbers were tattooed on the prisoners’ forearms. Anne, Margot, and their mother remained together in Women’s Block 29.
Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper recalls female Kapos in angora sweaters following the prisoners around with whips. Recently donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial, a photo album that had once belonged to an adjutant to the Auschwitz commandant shows the guards eating blueberries, lighting a Christmas tree, relaxing in lounge chairs. Meanwhile, the prisoners worked in weaving mills and prepared plastic to be used in airplanes, or labored at more useless and punitive tasks, digging up stones and patches of sod.
Badly infected with scabies, covered with sores, Anne was sent to a particularly dreadful compound, the so-called scabies block, the barracks for prisoners with contagious skin diseases. Margot went along voluntarily, so as to remain with her sister. At Auschwitz, the debilitating anxieties that had plagued Edith in the secret annex vanished, as did the muteness and near paralysis from which she had suffered at Westerbork. Seized by the determination to help her daughters survive, Edith tunneled under the wall of the scabies block, digging a hole through which she was able to pass them a piece of bread.
In October 1944, as the Russian army approached Auschwitz, eight thousand women, including Anne and Margot Frank, and Auguste van Pels, were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, inside Germany and farther from the encroaching enemy. Edith Frank was left in Auschwitz, where the gas chambers and crematoriums were blown up to destroy the most damning evidence of what had transpired there. Edith Frank died of disease and exhaustion a few weeks before the camp was liberated by the Russians at the end of January 1945.
The Frank sisters remained together in Bergen-Belsen. The most recent paperback edition of the diary, the one students read, concludes, as do previous editions, with an afterword adapted from Ernst Schnabel’s 1958 Anne Frank, A Portrait in Courage. Schnabel describes Anne’s deportation, her imprisonment in Auschwitz, “a fantastically well-organized, spick-and-span hell,” and her transport to the filthy, chaotic Bergen-Belsen:
“Anne, who was already sick at the time,” recalled a survivor, ‘was not informed of her sister’s death, but after a few days she sensed it, and soon afterwards she died, peacefully, feeling that nothing bad was happening to her.’ She was not yet sixteen.”
In subsequent years, other reports have painted a more harrowing picture of Anne’s final days.
Originally one of the “better” camps, Bergen-Belsen had degenerated into a hell of chaos and squalor. Tents were erected to shelter the new arrivals at the overcrowded compound, but a storm knocked down the makeshift housing, wounding many of the prisoners, killing some, and leaving the rest unprotected from the cold rain and hail.
At Bergen-Belsen, Anne met Hanneli Goslar, who described her as “a broken girl.” Hannah, the “Lies” whom Anne had seen in a vision, desperate and starving, had in fact been spared the horrors of Auschwitz and had gone directly from Westerbork to a slightly less terrible section of Bergen-Belsen, in part because her family had Paraguayan passports, which they had purchased in Holland.
At the Anne Frank Museum, a video monitor plays and replays a filmed interview in which, after fifty years, Hannah Pick-Goslar remembers Anne weeping as she said that she no longer had any parents.
“I always think,” Hannah reflects, “if Anne had known her father was still alive, she might have had more strength to survive.” Hannah arranged to throw a small package (“a half a cookie, a sock, a glove”) over the fence, at night. The first time, another prisoner stole the package. Hannah describes Anne screaming when the package was stolen. A second package reached her—but failed to prevent the inevitable.
In The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, Rachel van Amerogen-Frankfoorder reports that the emaciated Frank girls “had little squabbles, caused by their illness…They were terribly cold. They had the least desirable place in the barracks, below, near the door, which was constantly opened and closed. You heard them constantly screaming, ‘Close the door, close the door,’ and the voices became weaker every day…What was so sad, of course, was that these children were so young…They showed the recognizable symptoms of typhus—that gradual wasting away, a sort of apathy, with occasional revivals, until they became so sick there wasn’t any hope…One fine day, they weren’t there any longer.” She corrects herself. “Actually, a bad day.”
Corpses were heaped near the barracks, then buried in mass graves. Rachel van Amerogen-Frankfoorder thinks she might have passed the bodies of the sisters on her way to the latrine. “I don’t have a single reason for assuming that it was any different for them than for the other women with us who died at the same time.”
This account, by Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper, also appears in the book adapted from Lindwer’s documentary:
Anne stood in front of me, wrapped in a blanket…And she told me that she had such a horror of the lice and fleas in her clothes and that she had thrown all of her clothes away. It was the middle of winter…I gathered up everything I could find to give her so she was dressed again. We didn’t have much to eat…but I gave Anne some of our bread ration.
Terrible things happened. Two days later, I went to look for the girls. Both of them were dead!
First, Margot had fallen out of bed onto the stone floor. She couldn’t get up anymore. Anne died a day later. We had lost all sense of time. It is possible that Anne lived a day longer. Three days before her death from typhus was when she had thrown away all her clothes during dreadful hallucinations.
A few weeks later, Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British.
THE play based on The Diary of Anne Frank begins and ends with scenes of Otto Frank returning after the war, telling Miep Gies that his wife and daughters are dead, and finding Anne’s journal in the wreckage of the annex. No one asks or explains what happened to the others with whom the Franks hid, to the real men and
woman on whom the playwrights modeled the characters who have entertained, maddened, and moved us in the production.
In Auschwitz, the four men from the attic were sent to the same barracks. There they happened to meet Max Stoppelman, a tough, broad-shouldered Dutch Jew in his thirties, hardened by—and experienced in—the way things worked in the camp. His mother had been Miep and Jan Gies’s landlady in Amsterdam, and the couple had arranged for her and other family members to go into hiding. Stoppelman was grateful to the Franks, by association. So it could be said that Miep and Jan were still helping the Franks, even from a great distance.
Stoppelman took a liking to the four men, especially Peter. Under his tutelage and protection, Peter managed to get a job in the camp post office. Less could be done for the older men—better candidates, according to Nazi logic, for brutal outdoor labor. Hermann van Pels was gassed in the fall of 1944 after a finger injury sapped his ability to work and his will to survive.
Emaciated and exhausted, Otto wound up in the sick bay, where he was watched over by Peter van Pels, who took filial care of the three men with whom he had shared the annex. In October, Peter was evacuated to Mauthausen, where he died in May 1945. A similar destiny awaited Fritz Pfeffer, moved first to Sachsenhausen and then finally to Neuengamme, where he died from illness and exhaustion in December 1944. His companion, Charlotte Kaletta, continued to wait and married him posthumously in 1950.
How one pities Auguste van Pels, so protective of her fragile dignity and her meager creature comforts, so unprepared, as if anyone could have been prepared, for what lay before her in Auschwitz, and then in Bergen-Belsen, where she was imprisoned with Anne during Anne’s final days. It was Auguste who brought Anne, already ill, out to meet Hanneli Goslar. Auguste van Pels died in the spring of 1945, somewhere near Thieresienstadt, during one of the forced marches that followed the evacuation of the camps.
Down to a hundred and fourteen pounds, Otto remained in the hospital barracks as liberation drew near. At one point, the patients were ordered outside by the SS and almost shot, but the threat was rescinded at the last minute.
In January, Otto Frank was among the 7,650 prisoners whom the Russians found alive in the Auschwitz compound. It would take him six more months to return to Holland and to his daughter’s diary, which had been saved by Miep Gies, who, as I write this, in late 2008, is well into her nineties and only lately in fragile health.
PART II
The Book
THREE
The Book, Part I
IN AMSTERDAM, ON THE SUNNY AND OTHERWISE QUIET morning of Friday, August 4, 1944, a car pulled up in front of the Opekta warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht.
That is all one needs to write, and already the reader knows who was hiding in the attic and the fate about to befall them. We know it more than sixty years later, at a historical moment when it is often noted how little history we remember. We know the reason why we know, but it bears repeating lest we take it for granted that we know because a little girl kept a diary. Of all the roundups, the deportations, the murders committed during that time, this arrest is the one that has been investigated most closely, the one about which memories have been most thoroughly searched. It is the one we know about, if we know about any at all.
The car arrived without sirens, without haste. Upstairs in the attic, Otto Frank was correcting Peter van Pels’s English dictation. No one in the office below was alarmed by the appearance of the car until a fat man appeared, and, speaking in Dutch, ordered everyone to be quiet.
One of the men who got out of the car wore the uniform of a sergeant in the Jewish Affairs Section of the Gestapo in Holland. The officer was an Austrian, his subordinates Dutch civilians employed by the Nazis. They entered the spice and pectin warehouse, then went up to the office, where they found the Opekta staff. They demanded to know who was in charge. Viktor Kugler replied that he was. After searching the storerooms, the police pulled aside the bookcase that covered the door to the attic where, they had obviously been informed, Jews were hiding.
The first to climb the narrow, nearly vertical stairs, Kugler told Edith Frank, “The Gestapo is here.” She stood still and said nothing.
The Gestapo officer and his men entered the secret annex and found the Jews, as they had expected, though they would not have known—as we do now—whom they would find. Three men, two women, a young man, a young woman, a girl.
In a few more years, no one alive will have witnessed the scene of a Nazi arresting a Jew. There have been, and will be, other arrests and executions for the crime of having been born into a particular race or religion or tribe. But the scene of Nazis hunting down Jews is unlikely to happen again, though history teaches us never to say never. This will be the arrest that future generations can visualize, like a scene in a book. They will have to remind themselves that it happened to real people, though these people have survived, and will live on, as characters in a book.
In fact this scene is not in the book, but that book’s existence is the reason we know about the arrest. We know that the Austrian officer’s name was Karl Josef Silberbauer. And we know that he was disturbed by the detail of Otto Frank’s military trunk, labeled as the property of Lieutenant Otto Frank, which meant he would have been Sergeant Silberbauer’s superior when both fought in the German army during World War I.
Later, Otto Frank would recall that Silberbauer seemed to snap to attention. For the Austrian, the Jew’s former military rank created a troubling disruption in the simultaneously adrenalinized and business-as-usual theater of arrest.
In a photo from that period, the thirty-three-year-old Silberbauer looks younger than his age. Posed stiffly, with slicked-back hair and a lumpy jaw, as if he has tobacco wadded in both cheeks, he wears a tie and a jacket with a tiny swastika pinned to one lapel. Miep Gies described him as looking neither cruel nor angry, but “as though he might come around tomorrow to read your gas meter or punch your streetcar ticket.”
Silberbauer couldn’t help asking Otto Frank how long all those people could have lived like that, crowded together in an attic behind a bookcase. He was taken aback by the answer: two years and one month. As proof, Otto Frank pointed to the doorway marked with pencil to record his daughters’ growth. Look, he said, his younger daughter had already grown beyond the last mark.
A heartbreaking gesture, maybe less odd than instinctive, since his daughters, Margot and Annelies, were the center of Otto Frank’s life. Those marks, which can still be seen on the wall of the Anne Frank Museum, were what he had to show for the two years in hiding. Possibly, Otto Frank imagined that the pencil lines would kindle, in the Nazi officer, a flicker of humanity.
As we know, they did not.
After the war, Silberbauer returned to Austria, where he was jailed for fourteen months on charges of having roughed up some Communists in 1938. Later he was rehired as a junior inspector on the Vienna police force. In 1963, Simon Wiesenthal tracked him down with the aid of a 1943 telephone directory that listed the names and numbers of all the Gestapo officials who had served in occupied Holland.
Guided by a hunch that Silberbauer might again be working for the Viennese police, Wiesenthal found his quarry when the official newspaper of the Austrian Communist Party reported that Silberbauer was alive and well and, indeed, a cop in Vienna. The Austrian officials launched an investigation to determine the criminality of Silberbauer’s wartime activities. Otto Frank’s statement—that Silberbauer had “done his duty and acted correctly,” that he had been businesslike and even cordial—virtually ended the inquest, which was dropped for lack of evidence, though one might question the ruling that sending eight Jews to a concentration camp, seven of them to their deaths, would be criminal only if performed in an unprofessional manner.
Silberbauer remembered telling Otto Frank that he had a lovely daughter. He recalled her as prettier and older than she looked in the photo that, by the time Wiesenthal found him, was known all over the world. Given that Silberbauer went unpunished
, it’s mildly satisfying to imagine the moment he found out that the little girl he’d arrested had become a star.
The suddenly notorious Silberbauer complained to a Dutch reporter that his temporary suspension from the police force was making it hard to pay for the new furniture he’d bought on the installment plan, and that he could no longer use the pass that let him ride the streetcar for free. Asked if he had read Anne Frank’s diary, Silberbauer replied that he had bought it to see if he was in it. Why did he think he might be? He knew what had happened to Anne after he flushed her out of the attic. Did he imagine that, ill and starving, she could have kept up her diary in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, pausing from her labors to record her impressions of Silberbauer?
The reporter suggested that Silberbauer could have been the first to read the book that had been read by millions. To which the Austrian replied, “I never thought of it. Maybe I should have picked it up from the floor.” Wiesenthal concludes this chapter in his memoir by saying of Silberbauer, “Compared to the other names in my files, he is a nobody, a zero. But the figure before the zero was Anne Frank.”
WHAT could Anne have thought when her father directed the Gestapo sergeant to the marks on the doorway? The normally attention-loving girl would doubtless have preferred that her father not focus the policeman’s attention on her. Had she been able to describe this scene, and to make Silberbauer, as he seems to have wished, a character in her book, she might have recorded what came next, the detail of the briefcase, an event that would have caused her more pain and grief than anyone else in the room.
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