On 4 August 1944 Gestapo officer Karl Josef Silberbauer, together with three Dutch policemen, marched into a spice merchant’s on Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht and demanded: “Where are the Jews?” It was a piercing moment in 20th-century history, one that never becomes dulled by retelling. Within minutes Silberbauer and his accomplices had located a dummy bookshelf, behind which lay a secret suite of rooms where two families had been hiding for two years. Placed under arrest, these eight men and women were subsequently sent to concentration camps in the east from which only one, the business’s owner, Otto Frank, returned.
We know all this because one of Frank’s first postwar acts was to publish the journal that his 15-year-old daughter had kept during their immuration. The Diary of Anne Frank became a canonical text, one of the few accounts we have of living through Hitler’s Final Solution in real time. And it is Anne’s face – peaky, clever, ferociously alive – that has become the emblem of all the evil unleashed by antisemitism in Europe’s terrible mid-century. Yet despite the story being so familiar, there is one detail that remains a mystery. Who tipped off the authorities that there were people hiding at the back of Prinsengracht 263?
That was the question Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan set out to answer in her account of the recent attempt by Dutch film-maker Thijs Bayens and journalist Pieter van Twisk to find this final puzzle piece. Using the methodology and tropes of a police procedural, Bayens and van Twisk assembled what they insist on calling a “cold case team”, headed by recently retired FBI agent Vince Pankoke. Among his 30 staff, Pankoke had criminologists, psychologists, archivists, forensic scientists and a much vaunted artificial intelligence whizz who built a database that stores thousands of data points – addresses, biographies, political affiliations – in ways designed to throw up new suspects. Since publication, the results of their work have been disputed, and the Dutch publisher, Ambo Anthos, has suspended a further print run pending investigation. A member of the team, meanwhile, defended the research, arguing it was “appropriately caveated”.
Whatever the eventual verdict, it’s clear that Sullivan’s book struggles to find a form and style that serves her material. In particular she seems uncertain about how much prior knowledge she can assume in her readers, which means that two thirds of this book are spent rehashing the story of the Franks’ murder, and the postwar publication of Anne’s diary. Only once Sullivan moves on to actual “persons of interest” does the narrative begin to pick up, even though here again much of this information has long been in the public domain.
Up first is Job Jansen, the estranged and paranoid husband of one of Otto’s employees, who is convinced that his Jewish wife is having an affair with Herr Frank. Then there is Nelly Voskuijl, a Nazi fraterniser whose sister is one of the office workers helping the Franks to hide. Or what about long-time suspect Willem van Maaren, the light-fingered warehouse manager who might perhaps have been after the bounty money of 7.5 guilders (£35 today)? Most chillingly of all, there is the notorious Anna van Dijk, who from 1943 begins to collaborate with the Germans by luring her fellow Jews into carefully laid traps. Van Dijk was hanged after the war for the sheer scale of her crimes, yet the evidence for her turning in the Franks simply isn’t there. In the end, though, the cold case team single out a prominent Jewish notary called Arnold van den Bergh, whom they speculate may have passed on the information to the Nazis as a way of keeping his own family out of the concentration camps.
Blowback from historians has focused on the highly circumstantial evidence advanced for Van den Bergh’s “guilt”. Specifically they have questioned the claim that, as a member of Amsterdam’s Jewish Council, he would have known the addresses of the places where Jewish people were hiding. Regardless, what Sullivan does manage to do is assemble a compelling picture of what it was like to live in Amsterdam under Nazi occupation: here is a collection of increasingly isolated individuals, hungry, terrified and daily faced with impossible choices about whether to save themselves, their loved ones, or the nice family that lives next door. And it is this moral vacuum that follows in the wake of antisemitism, rather than any particular “perp”, that betrayed Anne Frank.
