Anne Frank (5 page)

So many Dutch people also wore yellow stars in solidarity that, as Miep Gies reports, their South Amsterdam neighbor
hood was jokingly known as the Milky Way. But the Germans made it clear that this was not a joke, and after a few arrests, only the Jews were left wearing their six-pointed badges.

F
URTHER
along in the June 20, 1942, entry, the introductory letter that Anne added to her revisions so as to bring Kitty (and future readers of
Het Achterhuis
) up to the point at which she intends her book to begin, she lists the regulations and prohibitions that have affected her most deeply: Jews were forbidden to ride in trams. They were required to hand in their bicycles, to do their grocery shopping between three and five in the afternoon, to stay indoors from eight at night until six in the morning. They were banned from theaters and cinemas, from swimming pools and public sports, and were not allowed to visit Christians.

“So we could not do this and were forbidden to do that. But life went on in spite of it all. Jacque used to say to me, ‘You’re scared to do anything because it may be forbidden.’ Our freedom was strictly limited. Yet things were still bearable.” (The “Jacque” whom Anne refers to here is her friend Jacqueline van Maarsen.)

As if to restore her sense of perspective, Anne quickly moves on to the unbearable thing. “Granny died in January 1942.” Then she returns to the subject of how the Nazi laws have affected her life, how she was forced to leave a favorite teacher when she transferred to the Jewish Lyceum.

The entry concludes, “So far everything is all right with the four of us and here I come to the present day.”

S
O
F
AR
everything is all right with the four of us.

On December 1, 1940, almost seven months before Germany invaded Holland, the Opekta company had relocated to a new home, at 263 Prinsengracht, where, Otto told his em
ployees, there would be room for the company to grow. The business was doing well, especially after Hermann van Pels—a friend of Otto’s who had run a meat-seasoning company before he too left Germany for Holland—was brought in to oversee the subbranch, Pectacon, trading in spices used in sausage making and pickling. This enabled Opekta, whose jam-making products were in demand only in the summer and autumn, to turn a profit year-round. Otto Frank and Hermann van Pels worked together, lived near each other, and as the Nazis’ plans for the Jews emerged, made plans to go into hiding, with their families, in the annex behind the office. Van Pels introduced Miep Gies to a friendly butcher who would later provide meat for the hidden Jews.

In January 1942, fifteen senior Nazi officials, including Adolf Eichmann and Reynhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Office, met in the Berlin lakeshore suburb of Wannsee to draft “the final solution to the Jewish question.” Over half a million German and Austrian Jews had already emigrated since 1933, and, at the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich offered this ingenious and ambitious plan for disposing of those who remained in Europe:

The Wannsee meeting was challenging but productive, and afterward, Eichmann, who would be responsible for implementing the new protocols, described his colleagues enjoying a much-deserved opportunity to relax. “At the end, Heydrich was smoking and drinking brandy in a corner near a stove. We all sat together like comrades…not to talk shop, but to rest after long hours of work.” During this leisurely chat, Eichmann and Heydrich hashed out the details of how “the final solution” would be put into practice.

As early as 1938, Otto had applied in Rotterdam for a visa that would allow his family to emigrate to the United States. But by the next year, 300,000 applicants were on the waiting list for visas. According to the letters discovered at YIVO in 2007, Otto began writing, in April 1941, to his college friend Nathan Straus, the Macy’s department store heir who was then serving as head of the U.S. Housing Authority, a New Deal agency.

Dignified and polite, remarkably restrained in view of the increasing desperation of his situation, Otto asked for the financial and political help that would allow the Franks to leave Holland. He apologized for imposing and assured his former schoolmate that he would not be bothering him if not for the sake of his children. Written between April and December 1941, these letters failed despite the support of Edith’s two brothers, who lived in Massachusetts and were willing to sponsor the family and underwrite their passage.

In the end, U.S. immigration policy proved too inflexible to bend even under pressure from Straus. When Otto explored the possibility of emigrating to Cuba, he was granted a visa on December 1, 1941. But the visa was canceled when, a few days later, the United States declared war on the Axis powers. In January 1942, Otto again applied for permission to leave Holland. But by then, such applications could only be submitted to the
Jewish Council, which was unable to arrange for emigration to anywhere except Westerbork—and Poland.

On June 20, 1942—the date Anne put on the entry in which she wrote about how “odd” it was that an ordinary girl like herself should keep a diary, and named her little book Kitty—Adolf Eichmann and Franz Rademacher, a virulently anti-Semitic official at the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Berlin, agreed that 40,000 Dutch Jews should be sent to Auschwitz. After much negotiation, the Jewish Council agreed to come up with 350 names per day, and it was decided that the deportations would begin on July 5. By the end of July, 6,000 Jews had been deported.

Among the European countries under Nazi control, Holland lost, second only to Poland, the largest percentage of its Jews; more than three-quarters of Dutch Jews were killed. Several factors contributed to Holland’s dismal record. The Netherlands was bordered by occupied territory, making escape more difficult. The terrain lacked woodlands and underpopulated areas in which to hide. The capture of the Jews was facilitated by hyperefficient Dutch record keeping, which made it easy for the Germans to find them, and by the initial and persistent disbelief of the Dutch and the Dutch Jews.

For every Resistance worker and brave Dutch citizen who risked imprisonment or death to hide imperiled Jews, others were unable or unwilling to help, and in fact did whatever was necessary to placate the Germans. Municipal clerks stamped
J
’s on identity documents, impounded Jewish radios and Jewish bicycles, and sent the Jewish unemployed to labor camps. Dutch workers made sure that the commandeered bicycles were in perfect shape, and were equipped with spare tubes and tires provided by the Jews giving them up. According to one Dutch civil servant, “Often one made an effort to be ahead of the Germans, in order to do what one supposed the Germans would do, at least what one supposed the Germans would like.”

Who can say, with conviction, what he or she would have done in their place? The Dutch people knew that their safety and livelihood and the survival of their families was at stake. “Everybody had a family to support:
the sense of responsibility towards the family was never greater than during the years of the occupation,
” was the bitter observation of one Dutch Resistance hero, Henk von Randwijk.

Given that there were never more than 200 German policemen in Amsterdam, the majority of the raids and arrests were performed by Dutch police, and by civilians paid a bounty for turning in Jews. From July 1942 to September 1944, 107,000 Jews were deported. According to Adolf Eichmann, the Dutch transports ran so smoothly that they “were a pleasure to behold.”

O
N THE
other hand, there was Miep Gies. Originally Hermine Santrouschitz, an Austrian Christian who had come to Holland as a child to escape post-World War I food shortages and was subsequently adopted by her Dutch foster family, Miep had been given a Dutch name and thought of herself as Dutch.

As a student, she was interested in philosophy and literature. Like Anne, she kept a notebook. But unlike Anne, Miep abandoned her dreams of writing, left school, and got an office job. She was unemployed when, in 1933, a neighbor who worked as a traveling sales representative for Otto Frank’s company told her about a vacancy in the Opekta office.

Miep and Otto Frank liked each other at once. After proving that she could master the intricacies of jam and jelly making, Miep was hired as a sort of one-woman complaint bureau to help customers who called to report home-canning problems. Miep was promoted, until her job combined the duties of a secretary, an office manager, and an assistant to Otto Frank.

Miep and her fiancé, Jan Gies, were often invited to the
Franks’ Saturday afternoon open houses, where Otto Frank introduced them as his Dutch friends. The Franks’ widening social circle would grow to include Hermann van Pels, his wife, Auguste, and their son, Peter. Miep also met Fritz Pfeffer, the dentist who would appear in Anne’s diary as Dussel, and whom Miep remembered as having the dashing charm of Maurice Chevalier. Pfeffer became her dentist, and she remained his patient even after Christians were forbidden to consult Jewish health professionals.

In 1938, Miep was shocked when she went to renew her Austrian passport and it was seized and replaced with a German one. Soon after, she was recruited by a “very blond young woman” and asked to join the Nazi party, an invitation Miep turned down, she told the recruiter, because of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews. After the invasion and the February strike, the Germans revoked her passport, and she was told she would have to go back to Vienna unless she joined the Nazi party or married a Dutchman.

Miep and Jan—a Dutch-born social worker with whom she would share the work and danger of hiding eight people above a functioning business—had already decided to marry; Hitler hurried along their engagement. A panic over the location of her birth certificate, required for the wedding, was solved thanks to the intercession of a relative in Austria.

A group photo of the Frank family shows them—with the exception of Edith, who had stayed home with her mother, who was very ill—in party clothes and in remarkably (given the escalating Nazi regulations) high spirits, on their way to Miep’s wedding on July 16, 1941. It was almost a month after the camera caught Anne watching another bridal couple from her Merwedeplein window. The occupation was already thirteen months old; a wedding must have seemed like a welcome distraction.

In her memoir and on film, Miep Gies gives the impression of being one of those rare people for whom independence, conscience, and the impulse to do the right thing are matters of reflex as much as choice. “Jews were such an established part of the fabric of city life,” she writes, “there was nothing unusual about them. It was simply unjust for Hitler to make special laws about them.”

After the passage of the law mandating the wearing of yellow stars, and after the ban on Jews taking public transportation meant that Otto, already middle aged, had to walk the long distance back and forth to work, Otto asked Miep if she would help his family go into hiding.

She didn’t ask, as anyone reasonably might, for time to think it over.

“There is a look between two people once or twice in a lifetime that cannot be described by words. That looked passed between us.” Otto Frank reminded Miep that she could be sent to prison for helping to conceal them, but she already knew that. Miep and Jan, who worked for the Resistance, also found hiding places for their Jewish landlady and her two grandchildren, another good deed that would have unexpectedly fortunate consequences for Otto Frank and the others after the secret annex residents were sent to Auschwitz.

For security reasons, no one in the Prinsengracht attic was informed when Miep and Jan Gies hid a young man in their own home, a Dutch student who had refused to sign an oath pledging that he would not take action against the Germans, and whose adolescent rebelliousness made him a dangerous guest. Miep and Jan knew people who knew people who knew how to survive and get things done, how to forge ration cards and buy extra sugar. Such information was available if people thought you could be trusted.

T
HE IDEA
of the attic hiding place had originated with Johannes Kleiman, the Opekta bookkeeper and a company board member. He and Otto Frank had been friends for almost twenty years, since Kleiman was associated with the Frank family bank that Otto tried to establish in Amsterdam. When the Dutch branch failed, Kleiman let Otto use his home address as that of the bank so that Otto could avoid paying rent on a commercial building until he settled his debts. Kleiman was helpful again when Nazi regulations prohibited Otto from owning a business. The Opekta stock was registered in Kleiman’s name, and he assumed official control of the firm, though every major decision was still overseen by Otto. Kleiman mentioned the attic as a possible refuge to Otto Frank in the summer of 1941, six months after the company moved into its new quarters at 263 Prinsengracht, and a year before the Franks went into hiding.

Kleiman was married and had a child. He was frequently ill with severe stomach problems that worsened during the war and from which he never recovered. He was said to have had a soothing presence. Anne, whose pseudonym for Kleiman was Koophuis, claimed that his visits always cheered her up and quotes her mother as saying, “When Mr. Koophuis enters, the sun begins to shine.” In the diary, we see him scattering flea powder, investigating a burglary, getting bread from a friend who worked as a baker. Thin, bespectacled, awkward, he appears, in a postwar photograph, hovering uncomfortably in the background with Otto’s second wife, Fritzi, as Otto stands in front of 263 Prinsengracht with the playwrights and the director who would soon bring Anne’s diary to Broadway.