Book of the week
The last secret of the Secret Annex
by Joop van Wijk-Voskuijl and Jeroen De Bruyn (S&S £20, 288pp)
When SS officer Karl Silberbauer and his two Dutch Nazi accomplices entered the warehouse of Opekta Ltd. on August 4, 1944. marched into Amsterdam and shouted: ‘Where are the Jews’?, 25-year-old Bep Voskuijl knew that the game was over.
As she watched those men pull out the movable bookcase and climb the stairs hidden behind it to round up Anne Frank and the seven other terrified Jews in the Secret Annex, Bep fell to her knees and prayed.
For 760 days Bep, as a secretary in Otto Frank’s warehouse, together with her colleague Miep Gies and a small number of trusted helpers, had kept the Secret Annex completely secret every day.
The only other person in Bep’s family who knew about it was her father, who had also worked at Opteka until cancer forced him to leave. It was he who built that bookcase to conceal what would become known as “the helper’s trap.”
Once Anne had begged Bep to stay in the annex, which Bep did by squeezing onto the strip of floor next to Anne’s bed.
With great courage, aware of reprisals meted out to anyone caught helping or hiding Jews, Bep had helped the Frank family and their fellow people in hiding for over two years by finding and bringing food and keeping them merry.
Bep and the teenage Anne had become very fond of each other. Once Anne had begged Bep to stay in the annex, which Bep did by squeezing onto the strip of floor next to Anne’s bed.
The shock of that August morning was terrible. Of the eight people in hiding in the annex, only one, Otto, would survive the subsequent horrors of forced labour, Auschwitz and – for Anne and her sister Margot – starvation and typhus in Bergen-Belsen.
Bep and Miep entered the abandoned Secret Annex a few days after the family had left. It still smelled of the cooked kidney beans they had eaten for breakfast on their last morning, and by mid-morning the table was set for coffee.
That glimpse brings out the suddenness of the catastrophe that befell them just before eleven o’clock on the 761st day.
The story of Anne’s diary, and other loose sheets of paper covered in her handwriting, which were discovered by Miep and Bep on the floor of the looted outbuilding and Miep kept it all safe until Otto returned in 1945, is well known.
In this riveting new book, Bep’s son, Joop van Wijk-Voskuijl, with the help of fellow detective Jeroen De Bruyn, tells the much lesser-known story of Joop’s deeply tormented and tormented mother.
The Secret Annex was a taboo in his family growing up after the war – and he wonders why.
Shouldn’t Bep, his heroic mother, have welcomed the halo and semi-celebrity of someone who had helped the Frank family during those dark years of Nazi occupation, even if the end was tragic for those people?
Instead, he writes, “If my mother even thought about the Secret Annex, she would get migraines, slip into depression, and spend much of the next day in bed.”
Was this due to a guilty conscience? Was she harboring a secret she couldn’t reveal?
“Who betrayed Anne Frank?” is an enduring mystery of the Holocaust. Last year, at the end of a long “cold case” investigation, Canadian journalist Rosemary Sullivan concluded that the traitor was a Jewish solicitor, Arnold van den Bergh, who had told the Franks to save his own family.
The story of Anne’s diary, and other loose sheets of paper covered in her handwriting, which were discovered by Miep and Bep on the floor of the looted outbuilding and Miep kept it all safe until Otto returned in 1945, is well known.
Scholars were quick to tear up her theory. Joop is careful here not to come to a certain conclusion, or to claim to ‘crack’ a ‘cold case’. We may never know the truth, he writes.
His mother Bep was the eldest of seven siblings in an impoverished and unhappy family. One of her younger sisters, Nelly (born 1923), was an ardent Nazi.
Early in the war years, Joop’s aunt Nelly took a job as a servant for a wealthy family who entertained German officers, and she fell in love with a Nazi named Siegfried.
She followed him back to Austria, discovered he was secretly engaged to another woman, and returned to Amsterdam heartbroken – but, more importantly, her return was after the raid on the Secret Annex. At least, that was what Joop had always wanted to believe.
Then, writes Joop, in March 2010, ‘everything changed’ and ‘the scales fell from my eyes’.
Jeroen had come across a typescript of some long, previously unpublished passages from Anne’s diary, in which she named Nelly as Bep’s sister, who “probably had a photograph of the Führer in her purse.”
It turned out that Nelly had indeed returned to Amsterdam in May 1944, three months before the betrayal.
Joop and Jeroen then visited an old man named Bertus, who had been Bep’s fiancée during the war years. Bertus remembered an argument at the dining table in Voskuijl, when Nelly had stormed out of the room after shouting to Bep: ‘Go to your Jews!’
So Nelly guessed the truth. She was jealous of the bond between Bep and their father, Johan, who liked to chat quietly in a separate room most evenings.
Nelly suspected they were hiding a secret from her. So, was it she who informed the hidden Jews as a form of revenge? Silberbauer, when he was finally tracked down by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and questioned in 1963, mentioned that he had been told that the informant on the phone had “had the voice of a young woman.”
And why was Bep spared the ordeal of being interrogated by the Nazis after the raid? Gies was subjected to harsh interrogations and the other two helpers, Victor Kugler and Jo Kleiman, were arrested and imprisoned for helping the Franks.
Could it be that Nelly betrayed the Jews to the police on the condition that they would not arrest or interrogate her sister Bep?
Another sister, Diny, recalled that the night after the robbery, their father kicked and punched Nelly and violently hit her on the head.
Three times in the past decades Joop dared to ask his aunt Nelly what exactly had happened to her during the war. Her eyes fluttered, he writes. She almost passed out; once she even had a seizure. “I’ve never been the same since Dad kicked me in the head,” she said.
She led a normal life and worked as a cinema usher and sexton in the church. She died in 2001 after falling down a flight of stairs.
Bep was a deeply unhappy woman for the rest of her life and it was not easy being her son. She married a drunken, unkind man.
One time, Joop came home to find Bep in the bathroom with an overdose that had saved her life. She swore him to secrecy. She and her husband had one last child, named Anne, after Anne Frank.
One day in 1960, when she was pregnant with Anne, Bep said quietly to her younger sister, “Rumor has it that Nelly is the traitor. In fact, we think it’s true, but it has to be proven first.’
Until that evidence arrives, we can only use conjecture. But that cinema messenger may have been guilty of one of the darkest secrets of the Holocaust.
