"Betrayal of Anne Frank" by Rosemary Sullivan
By Rosemary Sullivan
Author: Rosemary Sullivan
Rating: ★★★
When one visits Amsterdam, one is constantly confronted with monuments to those who died in the Holocaust, those dockworkers who resisted the all-too-easy accommodation of the Nazi occupiers, and those who bravely burned typewritten records that would have helped the occupiers find victims for their international campaign of murder. This is the easy story.
But when you lives in the Netherlands and sticks for longer than a 3-day lost weekend amid the canals and cannabis, one starts to understand that the reality was a bit more dirty.
As Sullivan notes:
…by the end of World War II, the Netherlands would have the worst record of Jewish deaths in Western Europe: 73 percent of Jews in the Netherlands died. In Belgium, 40 percent of Jews were killed; in France, 25 percent; in Denmark, .6 percent. In Fascist Italy, only 8 percent of Jews were killed.
What accounts for that percentage being so much worse? Humans are awful at statistical thinking. So this holocaust hidden by statistics is offset by the very personal and non-statistical, very real, very gripping tragedy of Anne Frank and her tragically brief life. By asking the question of who betrayed Anne Frank, Sullivan takes us on a longer journey into the uncomfortable truths of collaboration, cooperation, and betrayal within occupied Amsterdam.
I remember that I read in the Dutch journalist Geert Mak’s De Engel van Amsterdam (The Angel of Amsterdam) that the city had offered safe haven for iconoclasts, the intellectually persecuted, the religiously persecuted, the different for centuries. Its promise was tolerance if not acceptance. Mak concluded, as I recall, the first chapter with the ominous sentence that the only time it betrayed that promise was to its Jews under the Nazi regime.1
National monument to the sorrows of the war; by Guy Percival
To account for who betrayed Anne Frank and 73% of Jewish residents of the Netherlands, the book provides a synopsis of the history of the Frank family as Germany turned fascist: how Otto lead his family to Amsterdam; what did he do to try to get the family to safety; which governments closed their doors do them? Unable to get them out, they hid within in the story we know from Anne’s diary.
Sullivan provides a missing dimension. While the Franks and their friends were hiding, what were the dangers and of the daylight world from which they’d been exiled? What were the dramas of collaboration and resistance? Who were the neighbors that might have had the means to inform on them? What was the pressure under the NSB, Gestapo, SS, “hunter” regime like?
In the second part of the book, Sullivan recounts the formation and operation of a blue ribbon “Cold Case” team. The team works to describe, model, and sift data that explain the world that existed around the secret annex. The second part grows a little bit tedious in that it’s structured like a CSI case: leads followed, dead ends, etc.
Perhaps the most compelling thread of the story is that as of the 1960’s Otto Frank, the only survivor of the secret annex party, worked to obfuscate critical data. Why did he, as of the 1960’s decide to start making the path of his own investigation un-followable. Both Frank and Miep Gies (the Miep of Anne’s diary) knew the betrayer, knew he had children, and chose not to name him. Ultimately the case’s conjecture comes to reveal the unthinkable: the it was another father who traded information on addresses to protect his own children from being deported to the horrors of the East.
{
"title": "The Betrayal of Anne Frank: An Investigation",
"author": "Rosemary Sullivan",
"highlightCount": 17,
"noteCount": 5,
"annotations": [
{
"highlight": "Both Anne and Margot kept diaries. They were preparing for life after the war. They still believed in civilization and the future, while outside the Nazis with their accomplices and informants were hunting them.",
"location": 158,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "And because this whole case blew up after the war, I am the one dealing with the mess. . . . I wonder who is behind all this. Probably that Wiesenthal or someone at the ministry trying to gain the favor of the Jews.",
"location": 222,
"annotation": "Such a capability for stuff delusion"
},
{
"highlight": "How strange that the bully, unmasked, is always awash in self-pity.",
"location": 227,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "What are the real tools of war? Not only physical violence but rhetorical violence. In attempting to determine how Adolf Hitler had taken control, the US Office of Strategic Services commissioned a report in 1943 that explained his strategy: “Never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind.”8 Soon hyperbole, extremism, defamation, and slander become commonplace and acceptable vehicles of power.",
"location": 292,
"annotation": "The Donald Trump playbook"
},
{
"highlight": "Solzhenitsyn, fresh from the gulags, once said that the world has a certain tolerance level for evil; there will always be evil in the world. But when that tolerance level is surpassed, all morality cracks and human beings become capable of anything.",
"location": 379,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "by the end of World War II, the Netherlands would have the worst record of Jewish deaths in Western Europe: 73 percent of Jews in the Netherlands died. In Belgium, 40 percent of Jews were killed; in France, 25 percent; in Denmark, .6 percent. In Fascist Italy, only 8 percent of Jews were killed.",
"location": 556,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“More than twenty thousand Dutch people helped to hide Jews and others in need of hiding during those years. I willingly did what I could to help. My husband did as well. It was not enough.”7 Miep",
"location": 650,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“If the betrayer turned out to be Jewish, so be it.” The rabbi reminded Thijs that the Nazis had tried to dehumanize the Jewish people. “The truth,” he said, “is that Jewish people are human at all levels. As humans can or will betray each other, then there will also be Jewish people among them.”",
"location": 1676,
"annotation": "What a humane consideration of ones place"
},
{
"highlight": "It is a peculiar, though perhaps sadly not uncommon, psychosis to want to claim fame as a villain.",
"location": 1906,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "grudging opportunists who viewed the Nazis’ rampage as a neutral system to benefit themselves. They had no moral qualms about",
"location": 1920,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "it seems that some people were willing to betray Jews (one-third of Jews in hiding were betrayed). But they were less willing to betray Dutch citizens who were refusing to work in the enemy’s country,",
"location": 1987,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "He had a drinking problem; he sometimes made money playing the piano in bars in the area but then would drink away his earnings.",
"location": 2053,
"annotation": "How much of this could have been avoided with better arts funding. Failed painter, theater manager, and now a piano player."
},
{
"highlight": "However, in the last two years of the war, from April 1943 to April 1945, she turned into a grotesque monster capable of betraying several hundred people. Fear for her life may have led her to become a V-Frau, but what happened after that, according to her handler Pieter Schaap, was that she took to the work; she became one of his most effective informants.",
"location": 2390,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Is it possible that one thing we can learn from Ans van Dijk is that totalitarian regimes achieve their power not just through repression but through the seduction of insiderism, which turns people into craven sycophants? They believe that they are among the elite until, like Van Dijk, the power turns on them and spits them out.",
"location": 2394,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "He clearly recognized that survival was a matter of whom you knew.",
"location": 3861,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Asscher requested that the fiancée of one of his sons, a young woman named Weinrother, be deported to Auschwitz.",
"location": 3924,
"annotation": "Someone in this family was surely the source of the Asscher cut"
},
{
"highlight": "Arnold van den Bergh was a person put into a devil’s dilemma by circumstances for which he was not to blame, and, under pressure, he may have failed to understand fully the consequences of his actions. He did not turn over information out of wickedness or for self-enrichment, as so many others had. Like Otto Frank’s, his goal was simple: to save his family. That he succeeded while Otto failed is a terrible fact of history.",
"location": 4172,
"annotation": ""
}
]
}
Footnotes
- I parted ways my copy years ago and am going off memory here as I couldn’t find an electronic copy. I hope any translators or Mr. Mak will be gracious in any misremembered passages.