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Anne Frank’s betrayal has been an ongoing challenge. The primary betrayal occurred on Aug. 4, 1944, when the Nazis found Anne, her sister Margot, their dad and mom Edith and Otto, the van Pels household, and Fritz Pfeffer within the secret annex, nestled throughout the warehouse on Prinsengracht 263, that had been their pressured house for the earlier two years. They had been arrested, taken to varied focus camps, and — in all situations however one — died ugly deaths, be it by execution by capturing or in gasoline chambers or, in Anne’s case, from typhus.
That betrayal would have been an excessive amount of, as a result of each particular person and collective betrayal of Jews to the Nazis was greater than might be borne. However as a result of Anne left behind a diary, one which she meant for publication, and since it was saved by Miep Gies, one of many key helpers of these trapped within the secret annex, and since Miep gave it to Anne’s father, the group’s lone survivor, a tragic life minimize far too quick was remodeled into a strong narrative — resulting in a betrayal that's extra acquainted to us.
As soon as an individual turns into a narrative, their life is now not their very own. As Cynthia Ozick wrote in 1997, half a century after the unique publication of “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Younger Lady,” Anne’s story has been “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, diminished; it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and actually, blatantly and arrogantly denied.”
The worldwide success of the guide led to a Broadway play, a movie, untold different books and documentaries, museums, and a number of businesses staking their declare to and profiting off “Anne Frank,” the model. She was without end memorialized for the road, within the final pages of her diary, that she nonetheless believed that “in any case, individuals are good at coronary heart” whereas it was conveniently forgotten that she additionally wrote: “There’s a damaging urge in folks, the urge to rage, homicide and kill.” These diversifications and representations sanded over German culpability and virulent antisemitism whereas additionally failing to understand that within the annex that housed Anne between the ages of 13 and 15, there was fixed silence, no privateness and a 10-hour window by which the bathroom couldn't be flushed, lest it alert these ready to pounce.
As Anne Frank grew to become a logo, the query on the coronary heart of that first betrayal — who tipped off the Gestapo to the key annex? — was by no means satisfactorily answered. The Dutch authorities launched two investigations, from 1947 to 1948 and once more from 1963 and 1964, however didn't pinpoint a single perpetrator. Paperwork collected, scattered over a long time amongst dozens of archives. Suspicion landed on a number of doable suspects, together with a warehouse supervisor who labored for Otto Frank; a former worker who as soon as denounced Otto as treasonous; the Nazi-sympathizing sister of one of many Franks’ helpers; and a shifty younger man with a penchant for blackmail.
Now, because of a group of researchers and investigators led by documentarian Thijs Bayens, journalist Pieter van Twisk, and retired FBI agent Vince Pankoke, in addition to a brand new guide, “The Betrayal of Anne Frank” by the celebrated Canadian biographer Rosemary Sullivan, there may be a solution to who was behind that first betrayal. As reported earlier this week, the group argues that Arnold van den Bergh, a notary and outstanding member of Amsterdam’s Jewish group, was the perpetrator. This reply took years to reach at, relied on synthetic intelligence know-how in addition to painstaking archival analysis, and but it stays unsatisfactory, circumstantial, and all of the sadder consequently — one which highlights the broader issues of Anne Frank as icon reasonably than human being.
Someday after the tip of the Second World Conflict and the liberation of the camps, Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam, trying to find any information of his household. It will show to be probably the most horrible information: his spouse and kids had not survived — Edith executed at Auschwitz, Margot and Anne dying of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. After which, as he reported to a detective throughout the 1963-1964 inquiry, Otto acquired the next nameless word:
“Your hideout in Amsterdam was reported on the time to the Judische Auswanderung (Jewish Emigration) in Amsterdam, Euterpestraat by A. van den Bergh, a resident on the time of Vondelpark, O Nassaulaan. On the J.A. was an entire checklist of addresses he submitted.”
In some unspecified time in the future, Otto Frank made a typewritten copy of the word, which the chilly case group would discover it a long time later. He had entrusted it to a different notary, Jakob van Hasselt, and the copy made its solution to the boxed recordsdata of the detective Otto had informed within the Nineteen Sixties. The copy was forgotten till a descendant unearthed it just lately for Vince Pankoke. It was no smoking gun, however it was a lot damning.
Arnold van den Bergh was a widely known notary in Amsterdam. He was additionally Jewish, and on the time the Franks went into hiding in July 1942, van den Bergh was a member of the Jewish Council, a company particularly arrange by the Nazis to achieve direct entry to town’s Jewish group. That very month, the council had a brand new obligatory process: choosing which Dutch Jews could be deported from the Netherlands to internment camps, and which, in the intervening time, might be spared by Sperres, or particular exemptions.
For a time, van den Bergh held a number of Sperres, which stored him and his household out of the camps. He even managed one exemption that claimed he was not, actually, Jewish. However van den Bergh’s luck had a finite run, and by 1944, the exemptions had disappeared. He appeared destined for deportation at greatest — or, extra probably, a far worse destiny.
That didn't occur. Because the chilly case group investigating the betrayal found, there have been no data of van den Bergh in any of the dying camps. He and his spouse remained in Amsterdam all through the battle (although that they had, in response to Sullivan, positioned their daughter in hiding with assist from the resistance). It appeared that at a time of most peril, van den Bergh had a remaining card to play: giving up various addresses.
That card, nonetheless, solely purchased van den Bergh a number of extra years of life. He could be recognized with most cancers, journey to London for remedy, and finally die on Oct. 28, 1950.
Almost 80 years after Anne and her household went into hiding, it’s tempting to look upon the announcement that Arnold van den Bergh was chargeable for their betrayal as an ending. Definitely, Sullivan writes her guide this manner, as a result of “The Betrayal of Anne Frank” is structured like a police procedural, as if Pankoke was an alternative choice to a fictional hero — somebody like Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, the long-running LAPD detective character created by American writer Michael Connelly.
The announcement is nowhere near an ending. Too many questions come up consequently, most of them deeply discomfiting. The primary is whether or not it's even doable to show that van den Bergh was the betrayer. Pankoke, talking with Jon Wertheim of “60 Minutes,” known as his guilt “85 per cent sure” — sufficient cheap doubt that, if a trial was even doable, a conviction wouldn't be probably. Erik Somers, a historian with NIOD, the Netherlands Institute for Conflict, Holocaust and Genocide Research, praised the work however questioned the conclusion, particularly why the group made the nameless word so central to its investigation. And Ronald Leopold, the chief director of Anne Frank Home, was much more emphatic: “No, I don’t suppose we will say that a thriller has been solved now. I feel it’s an fascinating principle that the group got here up with.”
Different questions wade into the realm of ethical culpability. If van den Bergh was the betrayer, did he know whom he was betraying? The word, in any case, by no means named the Franks, nor another particular person. Because the notary’s granddaughter, when she noticed a duplicate of the nameless word for the primary time, stated, “Why would somebody betray others like this?” Then she learn it once more and “realized that it referred to lists, not particular folks.” She may then think about why van den Bergh had completed it, if certainly he had: “as a result of he was pressured, as a result of he needed to save his household’s lives.”
It's too reductive to view Arnold van den Bergh’s alleged actions as these of a Jew betraying one other Jew. That's what he did, on a factual stage. And if he had recognized who was hiding behind the key bookcase at Prinsengracht 263, maybe he might need made the identical resolution. However, instinctively, I think in any other case. Giving up addresses to save lots of one’s household, after years of doing all the pieces, nonetheless rancid, to keep away from being deported to dying camps, is an act of depersonalization, and of believable deniability — morally heinous, to make certain, however the product of an unimaginable scenario, a deed that’s tough to see as malicious.
There have been Jews at these addresses, maybe. However van den Bergh couldn’t know who these Jews had been on the time. Definitely he would have after the battle, as “The Diary of a Younger Lady” started its march towards worldwide immortality. When van den Bergh died of most cancers in 1950, Anne Frank’s identify was recognized throughout Europe, although “The Diary of a Younger Lady”was nonetheless two years away from English-language publication. We are able to solely speculate as as to if his alleged actions, and the commensurate publicity of the diary’s publication, hastened van den Bergh’s dying.
“Personally, I feel he's a tragic determine,” Sullivan informed The Guardian. I concur. The Nazis engineered beforehand unimaginable monstrosities by creating ruthless hierarchies, which additionally pitted Jews in opposition to different Jews. There was heroism and resistance, however precise heroes had been few, when the important thing was survival.
Which brings us to probably the most urgent questions, those that Sullivan grapples with however that also require better examination, maybe at guide size: when did Otto Frank be taught who had betrayed him, and the way did that information affect all that was to return with Anne’s diary? When did an unsolved thriller develop into a carefully guarded secret, and what had been the prices of guarding these secrets and techniques?
Realizing that Otto Frank might have discovered of van den Bergh’s doable betrayal earlier than “The Diary of a Younger Lady” was first revealed provides much more resonance, and maybe invitations extra criticism, of Otto Frank’s selections. Specifically that the diary operated greater than as mere archetype, with Anne standing in for tens of millions of survivors — numerous amongst them kids — who didn't have the acuity and expertise and need to chronicle life in hiding. It additionally operated as cowl for a deeper secret, one which works in opposition to tidy narrative and edges towards extra advanced, and thus extra disturbing, outcomes.
For Otto Frank to return from the battle, his household annihilated, he the one survivor, and to find somebody he knew, somebody a part of the Jewish group, had caused that annihilation would have been devastating. It will have, if made public, offered fodder for anti-Semites. And it could have altered the narrative irrevocably. As a substitute, Frank constructed a brand new story from the bottom up, one which put his youngest daughter on the centre. Nuance needed to be excised, which is why he trimmed passages referring to Anne’s budding sexuality and menstruation. Every subsequent translation and adaptation calcified Anne as a logo and unwittingly trapped her, like a butterfly in a jar.
“The Betrayal of Anne Frank” doesn't liberate Anne, since that's unimaginable. The guide’s byzantine genesis — by which the chilly case group secured a guide cope with HarperCollins (which, in response to “60 Minutes,” helped finance the challenge) after which Rosemary Sullivan was drafted to write down the guide — additionally doesn't serve Anne’s legacy properly. Sullivan’s bona fides are impeccable. Because the writer of the much-lauded “Stalin’s Daughter,” in addition to the gripping and evocative biography of Elizabeth Good, Sullivan is a author near my very own coronary heart. However this guide’s origin does imply it reads as a extra passive endeavour, as if Sullivan is receiving info greater than synthesizing and analyzing it. The guide’s rollout this week, with greater than the standard fanfare of embargoes, nondisclosure agreements, and unique tv specials provides one other queasy layer, creating extra distance between Anne the individual and Anne Frank the image.
Treating the Frank household’s betrayal as a chilly case does some work from a contextual standpoint, however it may possibly by no means change the core fact, as Sullivan herself states starkly on the finish of the guide: “That duty rests without end with the Nazi occupiers who terrorized and decimated a society, turning neighbor in opposition to neighbor. It's they who had been culpable within the deaths of Anne Frank, Edith Frank, Margot Frank, Hermann van Pels, Auguste van Pels, Peter van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer. And tens of millions of others, in hiding, or not.”
Anne Frank was a tragic sufferer of that regime, and so, in a special sense, was Arnold van den Bergh. None of this could ever be forgiven.