The Betrayal of Anne Frank – Throughout the 12-year period between 1933 and 1945, which saw the persecution and the systematic murder of over six million European Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany that is known as the Holocaust, there have been many individuals that personified the suffering and agony, as well as the courage and the hope, of this harrowing and sorrowful period in modern history. Such people that come to mind in that respect include Hannah Senesh, Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, Simon Wiesenthal and Elie Wiesel.
But perhaps the one person to emerge from the Holocaust, who represented innocence, maturity and optimism in the face of such immense tragedy was Anne Frank.
Born in Germany and raised in the Netherlands, Anne and her family – father Otto, mother Edith and sister Margot – along with four other people, hid for two years in an attic located in the annex of the warehouse of her father’s business at Prinsengracht 263 in the heart of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. During that period, Anne recorded her hidden life in the attic, as well as her thoughts and reflections that occupied the mind of a teenage girl during a time of war, in writing through a diary. That diary, which was unearthed after the war, was published in 1947 as The Diary of A Young Girl, and has become a perennial bestseller around the world, and to this day, is recognized as one of the major literary works to evolve from the Holocaust, along with Elie Wiesel’s Night and Art Spiegelman’s Maus.
Sadly, the fate of Anne Frank and her family is just as well known as her diary. On August 4, 1944, a group of Nazis and Dutch policeman, based on information they received from an individual, raided the attic and arrested its eight hidden occupants. They were later deported to Auschwitz. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen on January 6, 1945; out of the eight individuals who were arrested, only Otto Frank survived.
Until his death in 1980, Otto became the keeper of the flame of the Frank family, especially the legacy of his daughter Anne and her world famous, widely read diary. But he was also concerned with which person(s) informed the Nazis that led to their arrest, and why.
With that question left unanswered for nearly 75 years, it took the efforts of retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and a team of crack researchers and investigators from around the world to find out the answer. Using effective FBI methods, the latest in computer technology, not to mention poring over countless documents and conducting interviews with the descendants of people who knew or were associated with the Franks, the team treated the search for answers as if it was a criminal cold case, which helped to find out who was the person(s) responsible for betraying Anne Frank and her family.
Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan has chronicled this unique search for closure in her captivating book The Betrayal of Anne Frank.
Ms. Sullivan begins the book with a very informative backgrounder that takes up its first half, as she gives the reader a thorough historical perspective to the Frank family, and the harsh, five-year Nazi occupation of the Netherlands that touched every Dutch inhabitant in a tragic manner. Perhaps the most disturbing, infuriating part of that brutal occupation was the fact that many Dutch citizens, as a way to profit from the Nazis’ anti-Semitism or to save their skins from the sting of Nazi occupation, became bounty hunters known as “V-Mannen” or “V-Frauen” or “Jew Hunters”, in which they would inform the Nazis about Jews who were in hiding and the locations where they were hiding, for a nominal sum of money for each Jew who ended up getting captured as a result of their collaboration.
The second half of the book details the exhaustive work of the cold case team to find out who was instrumental in this betrayal. The narrative almost reads like an episode of CSI or Law & Order, as the team members utilize their specific specialties and skills to get to the desired outcome. And like an Agatha Christie murder mystery novel, it details the list of probable suspects, their possible motives for involvement with the betrayal, and the circumstances why they were or were not the perpetrator in question (the list included suspects such as Austrian native Karl Josef Silberbauer, head of the German Security Service – or SD – in Amsterdam, and Dutch collaborator and “V-Frau” Ans van Dijk, who was executed for her wartime involvement with the Nazis in 1948). All of the hard work, triumphs, setbacks and frustrations (a vivid example of the latter was the virtual non-cooperation of, ironically, the Anne Frank Fonds, an organization based in Basel, Switzerland that handles the distribution of the diary and manages its copyright) are told with the painstaking ability of a forensic investigator, which helps to make this book such a fascinating page-turner.
And yes, the team managed to find out who was the perpetrator that committed this betrayal. In all fairness to the reader, I will not reveal the name and the motive behind this heinous act; all I can say is that the betrayer was a member of the Amsterdam Jewish community; one of their own.
The Betrayal of Anne Frank deftly unlocks the mystery of the fate of Anne Frank and her family. Although the book provides a much sought-after sense of closure in this respect, and keeps the legacy of Anne Frank and her diary alive for many more generations to come, the main question of “Why?” still hangs over us to why over six million European Jews had to suffer a terrible fate at the hands of Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, and why nothing – or very little – was done to prevent such a massive tragedy to happen. That question still has yet to be answered.
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