So who betrayed ANNE FRANK? The jury is still out...
A documentary rather than facts drive this investigation into the Dutch girl’s demise
The Betrayal Of Anne Frank Rosemary Sullivan
William Collins €27 ★★★★★
Anne Frank was born in 1929. For her 13th birthday, in 1942, her father, Otto Frank, gave her an autograph book, which she immediately turned into a diary. A month later, the Frank family – Anne and her older sister Margot, and their mother and father – went into hiding from the Nazis in the small attic annexe of Prinsengracht 263 in central Amsterdam. Four other people hid there with them, unable to go outside, or even to look out of a window for fear of being seen. They were to be there for the next two years and 30 days.
Anne soon came to hope that her diary would one day act as a testimony of the privations families like hers had to endure through the days of Nazism. She dreamed of becoming a published writer. ‘Yesterday, as you’ve probably already discovered, was our Fuehrer’s 55th birthday. Today is the 18th birthday of Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth of York,’ she wrote on April 21, 1944. In the rest of her entry for that day she chronicles the progress of her sore throat, her boredom, the theft of some of the family’s flour provision from outside the annexe (she points her finger at a ‘shady character’ called van Maaren) and her hope of selling one of her fairy tales to a magazine ‘under a pseudonym, of course’. Just over three months later, on the morning of August 4, 1944, their hiding place was raided by the police and, at gunpoint, they were told to collect their things. By chance, the chief policeman then picked up Otto Frank’s briefcase, which held Anne’s diary, and chucked the diary to the floor to make room for the small amount of valuables and money the police had confiscated. In this way, Anne’s diary was saved for posterity. Her sister Margot had also kept a diary, but hers was never seen again.
The Frank family were then transported in freight cars on the very last train to Auschwitz. In
February 1945, Margot died, followed, the next day, by Anne. A witness was later to recall Anne’s pitiful death. She saw her standing naked, but for a blanket. She was delirious with typhus. She had thrown off her clothes, because she could no longer tolerate the lice. She knew her mother and sister had both perished, and she thought her father had, too. ‘It wasn’t the same Anne. She was a broken girl.’
It should be the saddest story ever told, but the terrible truth is that the fate of Anne was replicated, in other lives, millions of times over. The diary of Anne Frank is so powerful not because her tragedy was unique, but because it was so widespread. Of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands, 107,000 were deported, and only 5,500 returned. Even the peculiar circumstances of a family in hiding was echoed elsewhere. In the Netherlands, roughly 25,000 Jews went into hiding; of these, a third were betrayed.
Who betrayed Anne Frank? This is a question that has puzzled investigators for many years. The list of suspects has proved endless. As Rosemary Sullivan says: ‘Eight people hiding in a small space for 25 months – it was amazing that they lasted so long.’ One of those who helped them put it like this, ‘Eight persons are eight individuals. If each one of them committed a single slip each year, that would be 16 telltale signs’. Add to this the handful of friends who were in the know, and then the people to whom these friends might have inadvertently let slip, and so on, and the list keeps multiplying.
Two formal investigations have been undertaken, the first in 1947, and the next in 1963. Various books have pointed the finger at different people, some of them known to the Frank family, others more obscure. Or – less dramatically – was there no traitor? Might the SS have been conducting a routine search for illegal goods or weapons, and come across them quite by chance?
In 2016, a Dutch documentarymaker, Thijs Bayens, hit upon the idea of solving the question once and for all. By 2018 there were 22 people busy on the case, or ‘scouring the globe’, as Sullivan puts it.
How many of these people were strictly necessary, and how many were just there to make the documentary appear all the more urgent, or to broaden its international appeal? For instance, did they really need to rope in an American from Florida called Vince Pankoke, who had ‘spent 27 years as a special agent with the FBI, working undercover on highprofile cases against Colombian drug traffickers’? Or was it just to make the film more accessible for an English-speaking audience?
Sullivan, who was invited on to the team to write this accompanying book, does not let on. Instead, she breathlessly follows Pankoke through every twist and turn, so that her book becomes as much about the process of investigation as about the subject investigated. I was left wondering whether basing the book around this investigation was really worthwhile.
At one point, for instance, Pankoke needs to check Otto Frank’s handwriting. He gets in touch with a woman in America, and she agrees to send him a few original letters. Sullivan manages to turn this comparatively humdrum procedure into the heart-thumping melodrama beloved of TV documentaries:
‘[Vince’s] heart sank when, at 8.15am, he received a text saying that the shipment would be delayed until the next day, although the online tracking still showed that it would be delivered before 10.30am that day… But at 9am the delivery truck showed up at the office, and the driver walked in and asked for a signature. Vince thought: “If only he knew what was inside!”’
In layman’s language, this is called padding. Anyone who has ever had anything shipped from abroad knows there are delays.
The investigation follows countless red herrings. When the 22strong team finally whittles down its initial list of 30 possibilities to a single prime suspect, we have already reached page 229, and the book is nearly at an end, leaving only 50 pages to say why it thinks it was this character who hasn’t previously been mentioned.
But have they really got their man? ‘Vince is careful to say that there was no “Aha!” moment to end the investigation; the emergence of… the betrayer was just that: a slow coming together of evidence and motive, a jigsawpuzzle piece that suddenly, undeniably fit,’ writes Sullivan.
The adverb ‘undeniably’ is, I think, misplaced.
The suspect certainly ticks a lot of boxes but, on this evidence, no decent jury would ever find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Since the book was published, concerns like this have given its Dutch publishers cold feet, and they have decided against printing any further copies.
I think this is just as well: Rosemary Sullivan recently declared she was ‘90% sure’ their suspect is the betrayer, but this leaves a 10% margin of doubt, and that is surely too much.
THE DUTCH PUBLISHERS OF THIS BOOK HAVE DECIDED AGAINST PRINTING ANY FURTHER COPIES. I THINK THIS IS JUST AS WELL…