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.
THE 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.
The top-floor rooms had been used as a laboratory by a Mr. Lewin, Anne’s pseudonym for Lewinsohn. There, the pharmacist-chemist, a friend of Otto’s, had experimented, concocting hand creams and such. The space was vacated when the antiJewish laws prevented Lewinsohn from practicing even his humble brand of science. Later, Anne would dread Mr. Lewinsohn’s visits to the downstairs office; she feared that he might decide to “have a peep in the old laboratory.”
Together with Viktor Kugler, an Austrian-born, nationalized Dutch citizen who was married to a Dutch woman and who had worked for Otto Frank since the early days of Opekta, Kleiman—with the help of his brother—prepared the annex, installing a bathroom, doing the plumbing and carpentry, and amassing the provisions required to make the place habitable. They moved furniture, cooking equipment, and food supplies to the office after it became illegal for Jews to transport household goods and to go out at night, when most of the work had to be done so as to keep it secret. Among the things we rarely consider about life in the secret annex is the sheer amount of food—the sacks of potatoes and beans, the quantities of meat and milk—required to feed eight people, three meals a day, for two years and one month. Much of that responsibility and the hard labor would fall to Miep Gies, whom Anne describes as having so much to carry that she looked like a pack mule.
In our imaginations, the annex is simply there. In the Broadway play, the stage has been set, awaiting the Franks’ entrance. And that is essentially how it appears in Anne’s diary. Not until she and her parents have fled their apartment forever do the adults tell her where they are going. Of course, they have been protecting her from the danger of knowing too much, and she is soon given a chance to demonstrate how she has inherited, or absorbed, that thoughtful, protective impulse. A curious girl, Anne would have known exactly how the annex had been prepared, but the diary is unforthcoming with the details of the renovation, and the identity of those responsible.
In her first draft Anne writes, “We would be going to Daddy’s office and over it a floor had been made ready for us.” This draft includes an astonishing inventory of stuff (divans, tables, bookshelves, a built-in cupboard) and one detail in particular—“there were 150 cans of vegetables and all sorts of other supplies”—that one misses in the revision. Not until she includes the floor plan of the annex, which makes it clear how much work must have been involved, does she give a nod—and not a terribly incriminating one—to the Dutch helpers. And only in the revision do we learn that “Mr. Kugler, Kleiman and Miep, and Bep Voskuijl, a twenty-three-year-old typist…all knew of our arrival.”
To avoid endangering more people than necessary, Miep and Jan Gies were not informed until the attic was almost ready. It must have taken great care, planning, and ingenuity to keep the intelligent, observant Miep—who worked long hours at the office—from suspecting that heavy construction was going on when the firm was closed.
Once the Franks had gone into hiding, it was Johannes Kleiman who kept up a coded correspondence with Otto’s fami
ly in Basel, Kleiman to whom Anne showed her stories and whom she begged (he refused, because it seemed too dangerous) to submit her essays and tales to a newspaper, Kleiman who found medicine for Margot’s bronchitis, Kleiman who engaged his contractor brother to repair the roof of the annex after it was damaged by a storm. When the building was sold, it was Kleiman who thought quickly and pretended to have lost the key that would have admitted the new owner to the secret annex.
Kleiman’s daughter Corrie knew Anne. When his wife visited the secret annex, Anne would pester her for news of Corrie and of the world of teenagers outside. Once, by accident, Kleiman mentioned Otto Frank within earshot of his daughter.
“A few days later, at the table Corrie was telling a story about school. She stumbled over and mispronounced a difficult name, and I corrected her. Suddenly she looked at me and said: ‘You sometimes get names twisted, don’t you?’
“After that she never said another word about it. But now she knew, and kept her silence. Children can be very loyal, to themselves and others, and Corrie was deeply attached to Anne.”
Like Kleiman, Viktor Kugler—who became the proxy director of the firm, renamed Gies and Company, after Otto was no longer allowed to run it—played a crucial role in helping the Franks. It was Kugler’s idea to construct the bookcase that hid the entrance to the annex. While the Jews were in hiding, Kugler (who appears in the diary as Kraler) visited the annex hiding place almost daily, bringing magazines, newspapers, and other necessities and trying to maintain the group’s morale by being optimistic and by withholding bad news. He also bought black-market ration coupons.
“Primarily, however,” Otto recalled, “Mr. Kugler sold bulk orders of spices without recording the sale and he was then able to pass the money along to us. This was terribly important because over the course of the two-year hiding period our supplies were being used up. The responsibility that Mr. Kugler took upon himself was an enormous burden and he was always stressed, especially since his wife knew nothing about us, so he couldn’t talk to her about his worries.”
THE ANNEX was still being prepared for its residents to arrive on the target date of July 16 when, around three in the afternoon on Sunday, July 5, 1942, a messenger arrived at the Franks’ door with a registered letter. It was not, as they had expected and feared, a work summons for Otto, but rather for sixteen-year-old Margot. A list of demonically precise instructions—exactly what she was required to bring and how it should be packaged and labeled—accompanied the order directing her to report to Central Station for transport to Westerbork.
Otto was away from home, visiting inmates at the Jewish Hospital, the Joodse Invalide, which Crown Princess Juliana had toured in the late 1930s as a protest against Nazi anti-Semitism, and which the Nazis would empty of its patients later in 1942. When Otto returned, he reassured his family that they would go into hiding the next day, leaving behind evidence to suggest that they had escaped to Switzerland. That was what Hanneli Goslar was told when she went to look for Anne: they were safe in Switzerland. She would have no reason to doubt this until she and Anne met in Bergen-Belsen, shortly before Anne’s death.
On the morning after Margot’s summons arrived, Margot and Miep bicycled through the rain to 263 Prinsengracht. Wearing as many layers of clothing as possible, trying to appear unhurried, Anne and her parents took the long walk from Merwedeplein to the city center. When they arrived in the annex, the reality of their new lives, and of the danger they had so narrowly averted, paralyzed Margot and Edith, leaving Otto and Anne to fix up the attic. “The whole day long, we unpacked boxes, filled cupboards, hammered and tidied, until we were dead beat. We sank into clean beds that night.” Such sentences are typical of the way in which Anne managed to make an insane and horrifying reality—a family was about to spend two years in an attic to avoid being rounded up and killed—seem (as her parents must have wished it to seem) merely like an unusual turn in the normal course of events.
A week later, the Van Pelses—Hermann, Auguste, and Peter—arrived, bringing news of how dangerous life had become in just a few days. The frequency and violence of the arrests had increased, people were being dragged from their houses and taken to a theater, the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Jews were crowded into streetcars, transported to Central Station, and sent to Westerbork.
By the following autumn, Jewish homes were being raided nightly. In November, the month Miep’s dentist arrived to become the eighth resident, two thousand Jews were shipped to Westerbork.
Anne wrote in her diary, “In the evenings when it’s dark, I often see rows of good, innocent people accompanied by crying children, walking on and on…bullied and knocked about until they almost drop. Nobody is spared, old people, babies, expectant mothers, the sick—each and all join in the march of death…. And all because they are Jews!”
SOONER or later, experience teaches us how circumstances distort our perception of time. How rapidly the hours pass in the presence of a loved one, how slowly the seconds crawl by when we are stalled in traffic. It is hard to imagine how the residents of the annex got through the long days during which they were forbidden to move or cough or flush the toilet, the hours marked off, in fifteen-minute intervals, by the bells in the Westertoren. Though her mother and sister found the bells maddening, their tolling was, to Anne, “a faithful friend.”
Divided into quarter hours, two years and one month passed until, on August 4, 1944, the annex was raided and its occupants arrested.
Over the intervening decades, considerable interest has surrounded the identity of the person who betrayed the Franks. Later, the helpers agreed that someone must have turned in the Jews. Much of the suspicion has fallen on a warehouse worker named W. G. van Maaren, who was hired when Johannes Voskuijl—a trusted employee who built the bookcase that concealed the secret annex—became too ill to work. The helpers communicated their mistrust of Van Maaren to the Franks. “Another thing which doesn’t cheer us up is the fact that the warehouseman, v. Maaren, is becoming suspicious about the Annex. Of course anyone with any brains at all must have noticed that Miep keeps saying she’s off to the laboratory, Bep to look at the records, Kleiman to the Opekta storeroom, while Kugler makes out that the ‘Secret Annex’ is not part of our premises but belongs to the neighbor’s building.”
Van Maaren’s suspicions grew, and became even more disquieting, after he found the wallet that Hermann van Pels had accidentally left downstairs in the office one night. Johannes Voskuijl’s daughter, Elizabeth “Bep” Voskuijl, originally a secretary who became an administrator at Opekta and one of the Franks’ helpers, recalled Van Maaren noticing all the little slipups and mistakes the annex residents made, the pencils left out on a desk, a cat’s drinking bowl filled during the night. Bep was outraged when it was Van Maaren who brought her and Miep a sheaf of Anne’s papers that he had salvaged from the attic after the Franks were arrested.
A series of postwar investigations into Van Maaren’s alleged perfidy centered on precisely what words or signals had passed between him and the police who arrived on August 4 and asked where the Jews were hidden. But in 1964, the last of the inquiries into Van Maaren’s wartime behavior was terminated for lack of “concrete results.” Other suspects have included the wife of one of Van Maaren’s assistants, a man named Lammert Hartog, who told his wife that he had seen large quantities of food delivered to the warehouse, and a Dutch Nazi said to have blackmailed Otto Frank for expressing anti-Nazi sentiments.
Though he himself suggested that Van Maaren was the likeliest culprit, Otto chose not to focus his energies on bringing his family’s betrayer to justice. By nature, and as a consequence of his tragic experience, he favored reconciliation over retribution, mercy over justice. What did it matter who made the telephone call that the arresting officer reported receiving? How would it have helped Otto Frank, or his wife and children, or their Dutch helpers, to know who had sold eight lives in exchange for the bounty that the Nazis paid for the fugitive Jews?
AFTER
the arrest, the prisoners were taken to the Gestapo headquarters on Euterpestraat, then to the prison, the Huis van Bewaring, on Weteringschans, where they spent three nights. Otto Frank was interrogated concerning the whereabouts of other hidden Jews, but he insisted that, after twenty-five months in the annex, he had no contact with anyone who might be in a situation like his—a claim so clearly logical that even the police were persuaded.
On August 8, the eight Jews from the annex were sent by train to Westerbork. For much of the journey, Anne stared out the window at the summer day and at the world she had left behind two years and one month before. On their arrival at Westerbork, they were classified as “criminal Jews”—Jews who had gone into hiding or had otherwise refused to be “voluntarily” deported. They were issued special uniforms (blue overalls, a red bib, ill-fitting wooden shoes) and sent to the punishment barracks.
Westerbork’s parody of normal life included well-equipped hospitals staffed by excellent doctors who treated prisoners so that they could be sent off to their deaths. There were entertainers, a cabaret, a symphony orchestra, soccer games—all under the guard towers and in the sights of the SS machine guns. A musical revue was performed on Tuesday evenings; earlier on Tuesdays, the weekly transports left Westerbork for Auschwitz.
In the journal she kept throughout the occupation and continued to write in at Westerbork, Elly Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman a decade or so older than Anne, describes babies dragged from their cots and pregnant women forced onto the transport. One young boy tried to run away when he realized he was going to Poland. As a deterrent to keeping other children from panicking at the last moment, fifty additional prisoners were added to those who had been scheduled to go with him. “Will the boy be able to live with himself, once it dawns on him exactly what he’s been the cause of?” wrote Hillesum. “And how will all the other Jews on board the train react to him? That boy is going to have a very hard time.”
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