The Legacy of Anne Frank

by The Legacy of Anne Frank (retail) (epub)

  I have also been asked whether I thought the arresting officers ever subsequently discovered that one of the terrified Jews they took away that August day was actually Anne Frank. I don’t know the identity of the Dutch officers but perhaps in their later years they would walk past the long queue outside the famous museum and tourist attraction on the Prinsengracht.

  Karl Josef Silberbauer returned to Vienna in April 1945 and served a fourteen-month prison sentence for using excessive force against members of the Communist Party of Austria. After his release, he was recruited by the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), and spent ten years as an undercover operative, but in the mid-1950s went back to working for the Viennese police. His life was interrupted in 1963 when he was tracked down and exposed by the renowned Vienna-based Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who had been challenged by Austrian neo-Nazis to prove Anne Frank really had existed. When reporters descended upon Silberbauer’s Vienna home, the policeman freely admitted that he had arrested Anne Frank. Asked about Anne Frank’s diary, Silberbauer brazenly replied, ‘I bought the little book last week to see if I am in it. But I am not.’ Upon cynically being told by a reporter that he ‘could have been the first to read it’, Silberbauer chuckled and said, ‘Maybe I should have picked it up off the floor.’

  There have been several theories put forward as to who made that fateful telephone call in August 1944 that led Anne Frank and the other hiders on their journeys to death, and these point in different directions. In several books the betrayer has been referred to simply as a ‘warehouseman’ who worked for Opekta and had overheard noises from upstairs. In another theory it was one of the several opportunistic burglars who broke into the Opekta warehouse and offices during 1944, who had perhaps also heard something that aroused their interest while they were snooping around on the premises.

  Opekta’s warehouse manager Willem van Maaren has also been suspected, as according to Anne’s diary the Annexe occupants ‘did not trust him’. They had heard from the office staff that van Maaren seemed very inquisitive about whether anyone had been entering the stockroom after hours. He had also been laying his own traps to ascertain if there were nocturnal visitors to the warehouse, such as chalk on the floor and papers set on the corner of a desk. Anne talks about this in her diary entry of 25 April 1944. Van Maaren’s inquisitiveness could have had an ulterior motive, as according to Anne Frank’s German biographer Melissa Muller, he was also sheltering a fugitive at home. This was his own son, who had ignored the German occupiers’ orders to report for either military or labour service. If there were indeed sheltering Jews above the warehouse van Maaren managed and they were discovered, as the building’s warehouse manager this may have held dangerous implications for him and his fugitive son. Van Maaren died in 1971 without any conclusive proof that he was the betrayer.

  In the 2001 American Broadcasting Company movie Anne Frank, The Whole Story, the person who makes the fatal call from a public telephone box is portrayed as a middle-aged woman, who simply says into the phone, ‘There are Jews hiding in the Prinsengracht’. Based on Melissa Muller’s book Anne Frank, the Biography, she is assumed to have been a cleaner called Lena Hartog who was working in the Opekta offices, whose suspicion was possibly aroused by hearing noises or seeing clues left when the hiders came downstairs in the night. Lena Hartog’s husband also worked in the Opekta warehouse as van Maaren’s assistant, and he had shared some of his suspicions with him. Muller is sure Hartog shared this with his wife, as she too started probing the young office assistant (and the hiders’ helper) Bep Voskuijl.

  I can definitively state that it was not the young burglar who broke in during 1943 as described in Anne’s diary. I sat next to that very same ‘burglar’ at the lunch held after the official opening of the refurbished and enlarged Anne Frank House in 1999. My lunch companion’s name was actually Hans Wijnberg, and he had lived a few doors along the Prinsengracht. As an adult he left his ‘criminal activities’ behind him and became a sea captain, eventually going to live in Malta. During our conversation, I asked if I should still call him ‘The Burglar’. He laughed and explained he had been just a kid trying to find any money or items to sell as things were so hard in wartime Amsterdam. He did recall looking up at a window as he was scaling the wall of the courtyard of 263 Prinsengracht and seeing a young girl at the window of Otto Frank’s office. He had not given the girl any thought at the time as she did not seem a threat to his nocturnal activities, but after the war, it became clear to him that this girl was most probably Anne Frank.

  The dire situation for the Dutch people in the summer of 1944 helped stoke the number of betrayals. Enticing monetary rewards were offered to an exhausted and hungry population in return for turning in Jews to the authorities. Anne Frank Trust co-founder Eva Schloss, also in hiding in Amsterdam, was betrayed with her family on 13 May 1944, her 15th birthday. She has described to me the terror of that day, and the beating she endured from her captors, forever a terrible birthday memory.

  In Carol Ann Lee’s 2002 book, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, an anti-Semitic Dutch Nazi and petty criminal called Tonny Ahlers, who had had ‘business dealings’ with Otto Frank before the family went into hiding, is identified as the potential culprit. According to Lee, Ahlers knew that at the start of the war Otto had continued to do business with the Wehrmacht (the pectin his firm Opekta produced was essential for the preservation of the German army’s rations), a fact he would undoubtedly have wanted to remain secret. Otto Frank had also expressed his doubts about a German victory to an acquaintance he had run into, who then sent a letter to the Gestapo informing on him. Tonny Ahlers, who was active in the NSB (the Dutch Nazi Party) somehow got hold of this letter and blackmailed Otto for money in return for his silence. In her book, Lee maintains that Ahlers continued to blackmail Otto Frank with this until Frank’s death in 1980. When this suggestion came into the public arena in 2002 through Lee’s book, the British newspaper the Daily Mail published an extract from this chapter of the book covering a full three pages of the newspaper. It appeared in the Saturday edition, the thickest and most well-read edition of the week, with a headline splashed across the double-page spread boldly asking, ‘Did Otto Frank Betray His Family?’. I recall I was walking round the peaceful grounds of the magnificent medieval Warwick Castle, when I received a frantic call from the Trust’s President, Bee Klug. As a close friend and admirer of Otto Frank, she was beside herself with anger. ‘Gillian Dear!’ Bee always started her telephone conversations to me with the two words ‘Gillian Dear’, and the tone of these two words would give an immediate indication of whether what was to follow was good, bad or downright disgraceful. She went on: ‘This is an outrage. Do you realize how many people will not bother to read the whole article but will remember those four words: OTTO FRANK. BETRAY. FAMILY.’

  Bee was absolutely right and I was equally distressed. Of course if people read the three-page article to the end, they would also reach the conclusion that Otto Frank didn’t betray his family. They were betrayed by an outsider. Thankfully, this was in the days when newspapers were published and read in print only, and could not whizz around the world by touching the Share and Enter computer keys. On the Monday morning I called the Daily Mail and asked for the office of the Editor, Paul Dacre. I explained what it was about and within an hour someone had called me back to inform me I would be receiving a visit in person by the paper’s Executive Managing Editor, Robin Esser. This was good news – they were taking our concerns very seriously. Mr Esser came, met with myself and Bee and promised that if we wrote a letter of complaint it would be printed in the following Saturday’s edition and would also be the featured letter on that day with a large photo of Anne Frank to attract people’s attention to our letter. We were relieved that our letter of complaint would get an equally large readership as the offending headline.

  In the event this did not actually happen. My letter was published in the less well-read Monday edition and was not the ‘featured l
etter’ of that day. Our next port of call was the Press Complaints Commission. Bee and I duly wrote to them with our worries, one of which was the field day that Holocaust deniers, and in particular those who continue to claim Anne’s diary was a forgery written by her father to make money out of her death, would have with this misjudged headline to an explanatory article. This letter did not get the desired response either. Unknown to us at the time of writing it, the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission’s Editors’ Code of Practice Committee was in fact none other than the Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre. The Press Complaints Commission was a self-regulating body and remained so until its closure in 2014 in the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and the Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press.

  Carol Ann Lee has written several books about Anne Frank and her life, the most notable being Roses from the Earth (1999). Carol, who grew up in Cornwall, had an overwhelming passion for Anne Frank. As a girl she had even translated books word-by-word from the Dutch language using a Dutch-English dictionary, in order to increase her knowledge. I first met Carol in 1992 when she was 18, when I stayed overnight with her family during the time I was setting up the Anne Frank exhibition in Cornwall at Truro Cathedral. She has since become an acknowledged expert on the life of Anne Frank, and lived in Amsterdam for several years. She has told me that she was mortified that so much media attention for her 384-page biography covering the long life of Otto Frank had focused mainly on the relationship between him and Ahlers and her speculation that perhaps Otto had unwittingly given Ahlers a clue about his plans to take his family into hiding.

  When I spoke to her in 2016, Carol Ann Lee remained convinced about the possibility that the betrayer was Ahlers or perhaps even his wife. But she was honest about her big regret at how she had presented this in her book on Otto Frank.

  It overshadowed what were for me much more important parts of the book – and Otto’s own story. More than anything, I wrote the book because I thought Otto was such a remarkable and hugely courageous man, and that got hopelessly lost in all the kerfuffle about Ahlers, which was only ever a theory after all. I believe Ahlers is the most likely out of the suspects we have now, but I do wish that I had kept the information about him to one or two chapters, and not threaded his story throughout the book. I did that simply because I wanted to show the difference between Otto and someone like Ahlers, who typified how an ordinary young man could be drawn into the Nazi machine, but instead it read far more as if Ahlers was a huge part of Otto’s story.

  In 2015 a new book emerged written collaboratively by the Flemish journalist Jeroen de Bruyn and Joop van Wijk, the youngest son of Bep Voskuijl, one of the Frank family’s helpers. Joop van Wijk pointed the finger within his own family, alleging that his aunt, Nelly Voskuijl, Bep’s younger sister, may have been the person who betrayed Anne Frank’s family. The authors found evidence that concluded that Nelly Voskuijl was a Nazi collaborator, and she also occasionally worked in the offices of 263 Prinsengracht. She could have picked up something herself or even overheard Bep, who held the hiders’ secret for over two years, inadvertently saying something incriminating. Nelly died in 2001 without ever speaking about the events of August 1944, but to me this theory sounds the most convincing.

  In 2016, there was another theory that came out of a study conducted by the Anne Frank House historians themselves. Could it have been that the officers who arrived at the Opekta offices on the morning of 4 August 1944 were there because of a tip-off about fraudulent food-ration cards and illegal employment happening there? The museum staff looked at the fact that the Nazi police unit who discovered the family usually investigated cases involving cash and securities, not Jews in hiding. During the course of looking through documents, could they have heard a sound from above, and by chance discovered that there were eight Jews hiding one floor above them?

  So, in answer to my question ‘Who betrayed the Frank family?’ the answer is simply most probably someone who was around 263 Prinsengracht in the summer of 1944, but unless a cache of new incriminating documents happen to turn up or a person now in their mid-nineties suddenly recalls a crucial fact, none of the theories will ever be substantiated.

  ***

  A footnote about Carol Ann Lee’s Tonny Ahlers theory. In 2014, I was attending a meeting with the Prime Minister David Cameron’s team at 10 Downing Street. At the entrance to Downing Street is an imposing iron security gate always manned by one or two police officers. As I walked through the gate a police officer politely asked me why I was coming to Number 10 today. I explained I was on Anne Frank Trust business. ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ he said. ‘I have a sort of connection to the Anne Frank story.’

  The officer went on to explain that he had a friend, who lived nearby, whose uncle was a man called Tonny Ahlers, who had once been accused of being the betrayer of the Frank family. I probed the officer further, who told me that according to his friend, his Uncle Ahlers was ‘a real no good’ and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if Anne Frank’s betrayer had been him. Standing there at the entrance to Downing Street, having this rather unexpected conversation, I again found myself explaining, this time to an officer of the Metropolitan Police, that we will never now know for certain.

  Chapter 22

  Anne Frank is Educating Millions

  In 2006, the Anne Frank Trust’s method of working with young people started to evolve into something rather different, which would have a profound effect on the way the educational charity carried out its mission. Instead of our primary focus on staging exhibitions in prominent city-centre locations for one month, smaller-sized versions of the Anne Frank exhibition would be taken directly into schools for two weeks at a time, accompanied by a range of educational workshops and activities. There would be no need to advertise for local volunteer exhibition guides, as we would train the school students themselves to be ‘peer-to-peer educators’.

  The Anne Frank House educator Barry van Driel, who was a seasoned trainer and academic and had a profound understanding of how to educate young people, was the first to present the concept of ‘peer-to-peer educators’ to his Dutch colleagues after he himself had encountered the methodology in the early 1990s while he was living in in California. This educational method had been used in the San Francisco Bay area as a way of spreading an urgently-needed educational method about HIV/AIDS as rapidly and effectively as the deadly disease it was trying to counter. Barry had met a health education expert called Jennifer Reinks and she explained to him about this inclusive new approach to teaching and learning. Instead of just being expected to listen and absorb information, the peer-to-peer method would give students an important role. As well as for HIV/AIDS and sex education, it was also being used to educate about drugs and health.

  Barry decided to implement this method in the Watsonville community south of Santa Cruz where he was soon going to be working. ‘This was then, and still is,’ Barry recalled, ‘a very Latino community with a high degree of poverty. There were many drive-by shootings there in the 1990s. The gang experts I brought in also mentioned peer education to reach the very troubled youth of Watsonville.’

  After his time in California, Barry found himself deeply embedded in education programmes in areas of post-Communist Europe, as related in my chapter on the Balkan wars. In 1994, he was taking an Anne Frank education programme to Hungary. After Hungary emerged from Communism, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs started to invest funding to help the country in its transition to democracy. The process of coming to terms with Hungary’s past would involve facing its own role in the Holocaust, where exactly fifty years earlier, in the weeks between 15 May and 9 July 1944, 440,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered by the Nazis or helped in their deportation by Hungarian gendarmerie.

  More recently, Hungary’s own Roma community and its other minorities had been victims of persecution. The Anne Frank exhibition was invited to a 100 per cent Roma school in Pecs, a small town in southern H
ungary. The Gandhi School was the only school in Europe preparing Roma children for university education, and was named after Mahatma Gandhi for two reasons. Firstly, it had a philosophy of non-violence, and secondly to recognize the Indian roots of the Roma people. It was a weekly boarding school as it was located in a particularly inaccessible mountainous region with notoriously dangerous roads, where the school’s president and deputy president had both been killed in separate road accidents.

  A group of ten 13- and 14-year-old students were trained to be Anne Frank exhibition peer guides and in the process learnt more about their community’s own history, especially the destruction of the Roma community in the Holocaust, when 500,000 of their Roma people were murdered. Alongside the Anne Frank exhibition, the play Dreams of Anne Frank was presented with the students playing the roles.

  The play went on to tour primary schools throughout Hungary, and the ten actors from the Gandhi School went with it. They became role models for Roma children who were minorities in other schools. It also broke down stereotypical attitudes among teachers towards the Roma community, one even being heard to mutter, ‘I didn’t believe Roma children could act.’ Barry van Driel had taken a Dutch Surinamese colleague with him to Pecs. He remembers with a wry smile: ‘The kids told my colleague, “We’re considered black, but actually you’re really black”.’

  The group even came to London at the invitation of Anna Sher, who had set up a renowned theatre school where many of our best-known young British TV actors had learnt the craft of acting. One of the most multicultural cities in the world, London was a real eye-opener for the Roma children. For the first time they felt they were not being treated differently because of the colour of their skin, which had been the case in predominantly fair-skinned Hungary. After their return from the London trip, two of the group, Sabina and Laszlo, continued their roles as peer-to-peer educators by giving after school lessons on sex education, as HIV was starting to gain ground in the area around their town of Pecs. In the years following the project, Barry discovered that many of the group had delayed having children to concentrate on their careers, unusual in the Roma community. One girl, Anna Ignasz, now lives in Bristol in south-west England where she teaches in a school for children with special needs.