1
The Raid and the Green Policeman
On August 4, 1944, a thirty-three-year-old German SS officer, Karl Josef Silberbauer, a sergeant in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) Referat IV B4, known colloquially as the âJew-hunting unit,â was sitting in his office on Euterpestraat in Amsterdam when the phone rang. Heâd been about to go out for a bite to eat but answered anyway, something heâd later regret. It was his superior officer, Lieutenant Julius Dettmann, also a German, who said heâd just received a phone call claiming that there were Jews hiding in a warehouse complex at Prinsengracht 263 in central Amsterdam. Dettmann did not tell Silberbauer whoâd placed the call, but it clearly was someone reliable and well known to the intelligence service of the SS. There had been too many instances of anonymous tips that had proved to be useless or outdated; by the time the Jew-hunting unit arrived, the Jews had moved on. That Dettmann acted directly after the call meant he trusted the source and knew the tip was well worth investigating.
Dettmann phoned Dutch Detective Sergeant Abraham Kaper at the Bureau of Jewish Affairs and ordered him to send several of his men to the Prinsengracht address with Silberbauer. Kaper pulled two Dutch policemen, Gezinus Gringhuis and Willem Grootendorst of the IV B4 unit, into the hunt, along with a third detective.
There are many variations in the accounts of what happened before and after Silberbauer and his men arrived at Prinsengracht 263. The only thing thatâs absolutely certain is that they found eight people in hiding: Otto Frank, his wife, Edith, and their two daughters, Anne and Margot; Frankâs colleague and friend Hermann van Pels, his wife, Auguste, and son, Peter; and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer. The Dutch had a term for hiding: onderduiken (diving under).* Theyâd been diving under for two years and thirty days.
To be imprisoned, even unjustly, is one thing. But it is entirely another to be in hiding. How is it possible to cope for twenty-five months with total incarcerationânot to be able to look out a window for fear of being seen; never to walk outside or breathe fresh air; having to remain silent for hours on end so that the workers in the warehouse below would not hear you? The fear had to be extreme to keep to that discipline. Most people would have gone mad.
During those long hours of each workday, whispering an occasional word and tiptoeing while the employees moved below them, what did they do? They studied; they wrote. Otto Frank read history and novels; his favorites were the novels of Charles Dickens. The children studied English, French, and mathematics. Both Anne and Margot kept diaries. They were preparing for life after the war. They still believed in civilization and the future, while outside the Nazis with their accomplices and informants were hunting them.
By the summer of 1944, optimism had spread through the secret Annex. On the wall Otto had pinned a map of Europe and was following the news on the BBC and the Radio Oranje reports of the Dutch government in exile in London. The Germans had confiscated all radios to prevent the Dutch population from listening to foreign news, but Otto had managed to salvage a radio when they had gone into hiding and was now tracking the progress of the Allied forces through the nightly broadcasts. Two months earlier, on June 4, the Allies had captured Rome, followed two days later by D-Day, the largest amphibious invasion in history. By the end of June, the Americans were bogged down in Normandy, but on July 25 they launched Operation Cobra and the German resistance in northwest France collapsed. In the east, the Russians were moving into Poland. On July 20, members of the high command in Berlin had attempted to assassinate Hitler, which brought jubilation to the people in the Annex.
Suddenly it looked as though the war would be over in a matter of weeks, or maybe a few months. Everyone was making plans for what they would do after the war. Margot and Anne began to talk about going back to school.
And then the unimaginable happened. As Otto stated in an interview almost two decades later, âWhen the Gestapo came in with their guns, that was the end of everything.â1
As the sole survivor among the eight, we have only Ottoâs record of what happened from the perspective of the Annex residents. He recalled the arrest in such vivid detail that it was clearly seared in his mind.
It was, he said, around ten thirty. He was upstairs giving Peter van Pels an English grammar lesson. In taking dictation, Peter had misspelled the word âdoubleâ using two bâs. He was pointing this out to the boy when he heard someoneâs heavy footsteps on the stairs. This was disturbing because at that hour all the residents were very quiet lest they be heard in the offices below. The door opened. A man stood there pointing a gun at them. He was not wearing a police uniform. They raised their hands. They were marched downstairs at gunpoint.2
In his recounting of the raid, we get a sense of Ottoâs profound shock. During trauma, time slows and stretches out, and some details are strangely emphasized. Otto remembers a spelling error; a grammar lesson; a creaking stair; a pointed gun.
He remembers he was teaching Peter. He remembers the word that Peter stumbled onââdoubleââwith only one b. Thatâs the rule. Otto believes in rules, in order, but a dark force is sweeping up his stairs with the intent to kill him and all he holds most precious. Why? Power, hatred, or simply because it can? Even in retrospect, Otto keeps the overwhelming horror at bay, maintaining his self-control because others depend on him. As he looks at the gun in the plainclothes policemanâs hand, he thinks: The Allies are advancing. Luck, chance, fate, may save them all. But he is wrong. He and his family will be transported in freight cars on the last train to Auschwitz. It is unthinkable, but he also knows the unthinkable can happen.
When Otto and Peter reached the main floor of the Annex, they found everyone else standing with their hands up in the air. There were no hysterics, no weeping, only silence. Everyone is numbed by the shock of what was happeningânow, so close to the end.
In the middle of the room Otto noted a man he assumed was from the GrĂŒne Polizei, as the Dutch called the German local police force because of their green uniforms. This, of course, was Silberbauer (who was technically not a member of the GrĂŒne Polizei but an SD officer), who later claimed that neither he nor the plainclothes policemen with him drew their weapons. But Ottoâs is the more trustworthy account. Like that of most SS members after the war, Silberbauerâs testimony was designed only to exonerate himself.
The hidersâ quiet composure seemed to anger the Nazi. When he ordered them to collect their things for the trip to Gestapo headquarters on Euterpestraat, Anne picked up her fatherâs briefcase, which held her diary. Otto Frank reported that Silberbauer grabbed the briefcase from Anne, threw her diary with the checkered cover and some loose sheets onto the floor, and filled the briefcase with the last valuables and money that Otto and the others had managed to hold on to, including Fritz Pfefferâs little packet of dental gold. The Germans were losing the war. By now, much of the stolen booty collected for the Reich by the Jew-hunting units was ending up in someoneâs private pocket.
Ironically, it was Silberbauerâs greed that saved Anne Frankâs diary. Had Anne held on to the briefcase and been allowed to keep it when they were arrested, her diary would certainly have been taken from her at SD headquarters and destroyed or lost forever.
According to Otto, it was at this moment that Silberbauer noted a gray footlocker with metal stripes beneath the window. The lid displayed the words âLeutnant d. Res. Otto Frankâ (Reserve Lieutenant Otto Frank). âWhere did you get this chest?â Silberbauer demanded. When Otto told him that heâd served as an officer in World War I, Silberbauer seemed shocked. As Otto reported:
In Ottoâs account it is the Nazi who loses his composure, running up and down like the Mad Hatter, while he and the others retain theirs. Otto has caught the German military cult of obedience in Silberbauerâs instinctive response to his officer status, but he may have underestimated Silberbauerâs automatic, reflexive racism. Years later, he would say, âPerhaps he [Silberbauer] might have spared us if heâd been alone.â4
This is doubtful. After heâd delivered the prisoners to the truck waiting to transport them to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation, Silberbauer returned to the building to confront one of the office workers, Miep Gies. Perhaps heâd spared her from arrest because she, like him, was Austrian, but not before lecturing her, âAnd werenât you ashamed to help that Jewish trash?â5
Karl Silberbauer would later claim that it was years before he learned, by reading it in a newspaper, that among the ten people heâd arrested that day was fifteen-year-old Anne Frank.
When tracked down by an investigative journalist in 1963, Silberbauer said:
It is hard to imagine a more despicable, emotionally cauterized response. By now Silberbauer knew very well that âthat Anne Frank,â whom heâd arrested on August 4, 1944, had died of starvation and typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It was as if what mattered was not the dead childâshe is incidental, not real, her suffering is insignificantâbut that he is the victim. How strange that the bully, unmasked, is always awash in self-pity.
2
The Diary of Anne Frank
The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most harrowing books we will read if we read it for what it truly is: a thirteen-year-old girlâs daily account of life in hiding during the terrifying Nazi occupation of her city. Anne Frank catches every detail of the more than two years of claustrophobic life she spent with her family in the Annex attached to her fatherâs company.
She knows what is out there. Like the other seven people with whom she shares the space, she lives with constant fear, hunger, nightmares of abduction, and the imminent threat of discovery and death. She is not the first to experience this, but she may be one of the first to write about it as it is happening. The other masterpieces we have about the HolocaustâElie Wieselâs Night, Primo Leviâs If This Is a Manâare all written in retrospect by people who survived. But Anne Frank will not survive.
And this is what makes reading her diary so harrowing. From the beginning, we know the ending, but Anne Frank does not.
Anne Frank received the diary as a gift for her thirteenth birthday on June 12, 1942. Less than a month later, on July 6, her family went into hiding after her sixteen-year-old sister, Margot, was sent a summons to report for Arbeitseinsatz, compulsory work duty in Germany. Otto Frank already understood that âwork dutyâ was a euphemism for slave labor.
Longing for an intimate companion, Anne Frank invented a friend named Kitty, to whom she writes with complete and utter candor. She writes in her diary about hope, about the mysteries of her female body, about her passionate adolescent crush on the seventeen-year-old boy whose family shared the Annex with the Franks. Anne is still a child: she cuts out images of movie stars and royals and pastes them onto her bedroom wall. Though she was born in Frankfurt, Germany, having arrived in the Netherlands at the age of four and a half, her primar...