Nowhere to hide

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This article was published 26/02/2022 (1536 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There are words of such sorrow in The Betrayal of Anne Frank that they may lodge forever in the cupboards of your mind.

This includes the description of the torturous last days of the legendary diary writer Anne Frank in the Nazis’ Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany in 1945.

The German-born Jewish teenager was outdoors alone within the camp. Sullivan quotes a surviving inmate who knew Anne: “It wasn’t the same Anne. She was a broken girl. It was February. It was cold. Anne had thrown off her clothes because she could no longer tolerate the lice. She stood naked except for a blanket covering her shoulders. She was delirious from typhus.” Anne died shortly after. Her older sister, Margot, also in the camp, predeceased her. She too died of typhus.

Another survivor who also knew Anne said: “There (in the camp) it took superhuman effort to remain alive… But I feel certain that Anne died of her sister’s death. Dying is so frightfully easy for anyone left alone in a concentration camp.”

The Nazis eliminated three-quarters of the entire Jewish population of the Netherlands during the Second World War. About 27,000 were in hiding. One-third were betrayed for financial reward. On the other hand, over 20,000 Dutch hid Jews at their own peril.

The much-admired Canadian author of 15 books, Rosemary Sullivan is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. Her most recent book of non-fiction was Stalin’s Daughter, published in 2015.

The Betrayal of Anne Frank is Sullivan’s account of an exhaustive, truly Herculean review, undertaken over six years by a team of specialists — assembled by Dutch journalist Pieter van Twisk and filmmaker Thijs Bayens and including psychologists, criminologists and forensic scientists — on the fate and treatment of Jews in the Netherlands and how the Nazis tried to murder them all. The book focuses in on the identity of who, in 1944, put the Nazis in Amsterdam on to the location of the hiding place of the Frank family and four others.

The team identifies the person they say betrayed the Franks — and this is where the book gets itself into a mess of trouble. It says on the inside cover (where readers usually first learn what a book is about) that a team “has finally solved the mystery” of who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis.

However, a month before release of The Betrayal of Anne Frank, the leader of the investigating team cast some doubt on the team’s identification of the Franks’ betrayer. An American documentary asked him if he’d get a conviction if he took the person to court. “No,” says former FBI investigator Vince Pankoke. “There could be some reasonable doubt.”

Because the Anne Frank case was so long ago, and everyone involved is dead, the body of evidence is circumstantial. Such evidence suggests something, but doesn’t exactly prove it to be so.

“Circumstantial evidence is a tricky thing,” Sherlock Holmes once observed, and that’s probably what detective Pankoke was thinking in his TV interview. The Betrayal of Anne Frank, to put it bluntly, cannot provide any direct evidence that the person they name told the Nazis where the Franks were hiding, although the alleged betrayer may not have known it was the Frank family they were identifying. To call the person, now dead, guilty of betrayal — when you believe you couldn’t convince a court he or she was, and admit as much — is not only bizarre, but also unjust and grossly unfair to the deceased and especially to their descendants. As one scholar of Holocaust studies reacted: “With big accusations you also need big evidence.”

Sullivan essentially wrote The Betrayal of Anne Frank based on information gathered not by her, but by the team of specialists. The best that can be said about her questionable whodunit is that it nevertheless adds to the scholarship of what life was like for the Jews living in urban cocoons under the constant fear of discovery and death.

Sullivan describes in much detail the artificial life Anne et al were forced to live, hidden in a secret room in an attic above a spice warehouse where around-the-clock silence was the sound of survival, snoring threatened discovery, there was no privacy and they lived with a daily 10-hour time period in which the toilet couldn’t be flushed, lest it give them away to the people working below. All of this, for 761 consecutive days. It is surprising none of them went mad.

However, this chronicle of what such life was like for Jews in Amsterdam in the Second World War is nowhere enough to save The Betrayal of Anne Frank from criticism, and the book has sparked a firestorm of comment.

The team set out to determine who ratted out the hideout of the Franks, and to prove it. Sometime after the war, an anonymous note was sent to Otto Frank, Anne’s father and lone member of the family to survive the war. It named who it said had betrayed them, along with a list of numbers.

During his life, Otto never publicly named the person. But the team caught a break and ended up with access to a typewritten copy of the note from long ago.

Otto Frank died in 1980 at the age of 91. His alleged betrayer died in 1950. Who sent the note is lost forever, and there is no verifiable proof that the person the note names, an Amsterdam resident, betrayed anybody. The real culprit in all this was the Nazis.

As for the name of the betrayer, The Beatles said it best: “Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.”

Barry Craig is a retired journalist.