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 werecrowded 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!”
S OONER 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
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 werecrowded 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!”
S OONER 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
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