The battle lasted five days. Near the end, the Nazis threatened to bomb Rotterdam if the Dutch refused to surrender, and when negotiations stalled, the Nazis carried out their threat, killing nine hundred people. The Dutch rapidly capitulated. Queen Wilhelmina attempted to join the resistance in the south, but was persuaded to escape to Great Britain and form a government in exile. After trying to flee by boat, more than a hundred and fifty Jews committed suicide on May 15 and 16, when the Germans marched into Amsterdam. That was when, as Anne wrote four years later, in the phrase that the fifteen-year-old found to express the innocence of her younger self, “the good times rapidly fled.”
In fact, the good times lasted slightly longer in the Netherlands than they did in other Nazi-occupied countries, in part because the invaders wished to preserve good relations with the Dutch, fellow Aryans whom they hoped might welcome the chance to join an ethnically pure greater Germany. But despite the gradual pace at which the Nazis implemented anti-Jewish regulations in Holland, their intentions soon became clear.
By that fall, all Jewish-owned businesses were required to register with the appropriate government offices. Over the next months, Jews were fired from university and government positions, Jewish newspapers were shut down. An illegal student newspaper announced that a “cold pogrom” had begun. In January 1941, all Dutch Jews were forced to register with the state and were banned from movie theaters. This would have been a hardship for the movie-star-struck Anne, who fails to mention this as the reason for her friends being treated to a private showing of a Rin Tin Tin film at her birthday party in June 1942. By then, the basic necessities of life—food, transportation, shelter, safety—had become problematic for Jewish families. Nonetheless, the Franks sent cookies to school with Anne so she could celebrate her birthday there as well, and found a way to entertain “lots of boys and girls.”
Otto and Edith Frank did everything they could to regularize their family’s increasingly restricted daily existence. If the children couldn’t go to the theater, they could watch Rin Tin Tin at home. On her first visit to the Franks’ apartment, Miep Gies observed toys, drawings, and other signs that the children “dominated the house.” Later, she noticed that the adults’ conversations about the war ended abruptly when the girls appeared, and didn’t resume until after the girls had finished their cake and left the room.
When Anne describes the fun she has with her Ping-Pong club at the only ice cream parlors to which Jews were still permitted to go, she doesn’t allude to the incident at Koco, a similar establishment that was the scene of a battle between German police and Jewish customers. The incident led to the execution of Koco’s German-Jewish owner, who refused, under torture, to name the person whose idea it was to rig up a device that sprayed the Nazis with ammonia.
Jews were forbidden to give blood, to sit on park benches, to attend horse races, or to travel. The Nazi newspaper celebrated the exclusion of Jews from the country’s beaches: “Our North Sea will no longer serve to rinse down fat Jewish bodies.”
As the political violence increased, Dutch citizens began to witness random street roundups (razzia) of Jews. In retaliation for a street brawl in which a Dutch Nazi was killed, four hundred young male “hostages” were arrested in a raid that began on the night of February 22, 1941, and resumed the next morning. Incensed, the unions and labor movements organized a general strike that shut down Amsterdam. The Nazis imposed a curfew, shot four strikers, and jailed twenty-two more. The strike ended two days later, or as Miep Gies recalls more sanguinely, it lasted “three marvelous days.” The four hundred hostages were sent first to Buchenwald and then, as punishment for the fact that the Jewish Council had requested their release, to the labor camp at Mauthausen, where the commandant had given his son fifty Jews for target practice as a birthday present, and where nearly all four hundred hostages died.
During the spring and summer in which the ten-second film of the bride and groom was shot, Jews were forbidden to frequent parks, zoos, cafes, museums, public libraries, and auctions. No wonder so many Merwedeplein residents had nothing to do on a sunny June day but watch a newlywed couple walk down a flight of stairs.
That autumn, another law made it illegal for Jewish children to attend school with Christian classmates; all summer, the employees of the Dutch educational system had worked overtime to ensure that the segregated system was operational by the start of the fall term. A teacher at the Montessori school that Anne was forced to leave recalled that they lost eighty-seven students as a result of the new decree. Until then, they had not realized how many of their pupils were Jewish. Of those eighty-seven children, only twenty would survive the war.
Several short reminiscences collected in Tales from the Secret Annex concern Anne’s experience at the Jewish Lyceum, to which she and Margot transferred after the ruling was put into effect. In “My First Day at the Lyceum,” Anne describes being more afraid of having to take geometry than of the law requiring her to change schools. She reports having little sympathy for a gray-haired, mousy teacher, “wringing her hands” as she made organizational announcements. Perhaps her hand wringing had to do with a premonition about the Nazi educational policies, a worry which would have seemed less urgent to the children adjusting to new surroundings. Postwar research has shown that many Jewish children enjoyed their time at the Jewish Lyceum; reunions have been held, at which survivors recalled how glad they were to be at a school where they felt, however temporarily, safe.
Whatever anxiety Anne experienced was dispelled when she managed to get her friend Lies (Hanneli Goslar) moved into her class. “The school—which had given me so many advantages and so much pleasure—was now smiling down on me, and I began, my spirits soaring again, to pay attention to what the geography teacher was saying.”
Other sketches portray the math teacher who called Anne Miss Quack Quack and the biology instructor whose favorite subject was reproduction, “probably because she’s an old maid.” In a series of answers to the questions that Anne wrote in the exercise book and titled “Do You Remember?,” subtitled “Memories of My School Days at the Jewish Lyceum,” the longest section is devoted to an incident in which Anne and Lies, accused of cheating on a French test, explained that the entire class was cheating, then wrote a letter of apology to their schoolmates for having snitched. The piece ends with Anne’s hope that someday she will again be able to enjoy carefree school days.
The historian Jacob Presser taught history at the Jewish Lyceum. In the summer of 1942, at a ceremony to celebrate the lyceum’s first anniversary, a usually reserved and circumspect colleague told Presser that the war was growing worse with every hour. Later, Presser would learn that the professor had just heard about the proposed mass deportations. As the raids and roundups became more frequent, there were often empty seats in the classroom. Presser recalled the pantomime with which he and the children acknowledged these absences. The teacher nodded at the empty desk, and the others either made a quick hand gesture, meaning underground, or a fist, meaning arrested. All this was done in silence. Hanneli Goslar remembered Presser bursting into tears during a lecture about the Renaissance; his young wife, who would be killed in the war, had been taken away the night before.
After the war, in cooperation with the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, Presser would go on to write a definitive history of the period, The Destruction of the Dutch Jews. Among the remarkable aspects of Presser’s book is his documentation of the bizarre respect for the legal process—the concern that everything be done according to the letter of the law—that went hand in hand with the Nazis’ brutality. Each order depriving the Jews of their dignity, their liberty, and their ability to sustain themselves featured clauses and subclauses designed to make everything “clear.” If a law was found to be “flawed”—for example, if it was discovered that the Jews required to hand in their radios were giving up old or damaged sets and keeping better models—a new law would be passed, modifying and improving the old one; now, upo
n surrendering their radios, Jews were forced to sign a statement swearing that they had not substituted inferior ones, and those who had already given up their sets were called back to fill out a declaration. When it was decreed that Jews could no longer ride in motorized vehicles, an exception was made for funerals; the corpse could be transported in a hearse, but the mourners still had to walk.
In January 1942, the Franks signed up for “voluntary emigration.” And in April, the Jewish Council, established to control and pacify the Jewish population, distributed over half a million yellow stars, with directions on how they should be worn by every Jew over six years of age. The mandatory stars were given out along with a bill: each star cost a few pennies and one textile-ration coupon. One teacher at the Jewish Lyceum refused to wear his star because, he said, he refused to be led like a lamb to the slaughter. When his students argued that they had been told the star was a badge of honor—as Anne says in the dramatized versions of her diary—the teacher replied that those who thought so should wear it. Ultimately, he gave in, and his wife, weeping, sewed the star to his jacket. After a week, he decided to face the consequences and removed the star.
So many Dutch people also wore yellow stars in solidarity that, as Miep Gies reports, their South Amsterdam neighborhood 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.
FURTHER 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.”
SO FAR 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 employees, 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:
Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.
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, “Of
ten 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.”
ON 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.
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