Below is an excerpt from my journal of April, 2000, about my meeting with Dutch writer Mies Bouhuys, who told me that Anne Frank and her family were betrayed to the Nazis by a man named Willem van Maaren. I’ve written about her claim over the past couple of weeks, starting here. 

This has led to pushback on Twitter/X from a Dutch woman who says van Maaren didn’t have four children, as Mies Bouyhus remembered. She also says that van Maaren was alive in 1963, which no one disputed. Another woman congratulates her in a tweet for standing up for “the ancestors,” which I’m told means standing up for the Dutch Jewish community. I find this puzzling, since I said I didn’t believe claims that people in the Annex were betrayed by a Jewish notary: claims made in a recent book based on a cold case investigation into the crime, and written by Rosemary Sullivan. Finally a man tweets that van Maaren was disliked for being “shifty and unsympathetic” but cleared of the betrayal by earlier investigations. I regard the posts I’m writing as a report, so I’m reporting what they say as well as what Mies Bouyhus told me.

All those years ago, I was in the Netherlands to do research for my third novel, The Corner Garden. I hadn’t started writing the book, but planned to make one of the characters a Dutch man who had collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of Holland in the Second World War. As I’ve written, I was told that no one would admit to having been a collaborator, so I spoke with members of the resistance, whose safety depended on knowing their enemies. Mies Bouhuys’s father and brother were in the resistance, and we discussed details of daily life during the occupation. I was also interested in how Dutch people saw the arrival of Canadian soldiers who marched in to liberate the country near the end of the war. I thought I might include some scenes with Canadian soldiers, although in the end I didn’t.

After we’d discussed these topics, Mies surprised me by starting to talk about Anne Frank. 

I’m going to excerpt my account of our meeting from the beginning, including information about wartime life in the Netherlands that I found useful in writing The Corner Garden. The entries were written quickly and I’ve edited them slightly for clarity without changing the content.

I walked to Mies Bouhuys’s apartment, a black-fronted place with a six-inch-wide flower garden in front, the way they have here, enough for a line of primulas one deep. It’s on Prinsengracht, along the canal from the Anne Frank House museum, just up from the Leidesplein. It was warmer and sunnier yesterday and she was lively and cheerful, greeting me at the black door, leading me inside. The rooms are big in apartments here, at least compared to our small downtown Toronto house, walls torn down to make one big main living room with a kitchen just off it, and her place was like that on several levels. I guess she has the whole house, because as well as the two open levels I saw, there was a trap door leading on to the third storey.

Books, plants, antique furniture mixed with good new stuff. I sat on a suede sofa while she was on a high-backed upholstered chair struck with cat scratches from a long-haired black cat she was nervous of me petting. “He was rejected by his short-haired mother, pushed out of the cat nest for his long hair, and he will appear friendly before things turn bad.” She made tea. Thank heavens everyone drinks tea here (I don’t drink coffee) though without milk, and she brought out cups exactly like ours and delicious little caramel biscuits. I think she liked that we have the same cups. I’m still wondering why she opened up the way she did.

Small, lined, brown hair well dyed, if dyed, and agile. A chain smoker who filled empty filtered cigarettes with tobacco in a funny little roller. Click click and the cigarette was filled.

I told her how the Second World War reverberates in Canada, and about my father’s experiences. (I found it reassured people during my time in the Netherlands to mention that my father had fought in the Canadian Army throughout the war. I would also tell people that although my surname is German, my father’s family is Swedish, my grandfather having been adopted by a German-American man after his Swedish father died.)

I also told her about the people living next door to us when I was a child, and how they were behind my idea for my new novel. So I was interested, first of all, in what a Canadian soldier would have seen in Holland when he marched in to liberate the country from the Nazis in 1945.

She said that her brother, who had worked on a resistance newspaper during the war, knew from his illegal radio that the Canadians would be coming north from their bases in the southern part of the country to liberate Amsterdam. So he managed to get into closed sections of the library—this was very dangerous—and smuggle out words and music to the Maple Leaf Forever so the children could learn it and sing it for the arriving soldiers. So the soldiers driving through her village of Weesp heard the children sing this “and another song I forget, when Wolfe on something shores did something.” 

They saw thin barefoot children, even though this was in the countryside nears farms and they were relatively well fed. Moving into Amsterdam, they would have found much thinner people lining the road and cheering, very sketchily dressed, shoes a real problem. You’d see people wearing one man’s shoe and one slipper. Also extraordinarily pale people, the ones who’d been in hiding and hadn’t seen the sun for up to four years. No cats or pigeons; they’d been eaten. Small trees cut down. The Jewish quarter stripped and empty. No one moved into their houses in the centre when they were taken away. (I wonder about this, and gather this wasn’t true in the south of the city, where the Jews who had lived there mostly rented, anyway.)

In any case, some were empty and at the latest by the Hunger Winter (1944-45) they were stripped clean of wood: floors and windowsills and even the lathe in the walls. People needed fuel. They’d sneak in and carry it away, although they risked being shot by the Nazis and did this at night. A double danger in the summer when it’s light until 10 pm or later, because curfew was at 8 pm. Again, they could shoot curfew-breakers, although members of the NSB, the Dutch Nazi party, were given permission to be out after curfew.

I saw in photos in the Resistance Museum as well that older women, working class and rural women, could still wear the old-fashioned caps, although they fell into disuse after the war.  Herman’s wife Marianne (writer Herman Divendal, whom I knew through my work in the writers and human rights group PEN Canada) said her mother and four sisters took turns wearing the one dress they’d saved for after the war, each sister getting the dress for a day to attend one of the street parties. On the day Marianne’s mother got the dress, she met her future husband.

What the Dutch saw were enormous handsome beefy men, well-fed Canadian soldiers taller than them and made bigger by their uniforms and equipment. Mies said she didn’t perceive them as young, though she was 17, but fully male and fully adult. Her impression is that this is generally how they were seen, although the first soldier arriving in their village, the first Canadian, told them he was so terribly tired, and Mies said he looked it.

Her village was only 10 kilometers outside Amsterdam so she bicycled in every day. The war made her immediately older, she said, immediately sharper. She began to notice things, especially food. She’d come back and tell her mother, they have strawberries there.

Later, after having dinner

Where was I? Amsterdam, Mies Bouhuys, the liberation, working backwards. Her father was the Protestant minister is their small town and a member of the resistance. In school he spoke out against the treatment of the Jews and a boy reported him to his father, a pharmacist and a Nazi, and he was dismissed from his job. She said there were 15 Nazis in their village of 50 families. Everyone knew who they were and everyone knew who was in the resistance and who was hiding someone except the Nazis. These other people helped her family out. 

In fact, Herman told me his father hid Jews in his village throughout the war and even though the policeman next door was officially close to the Nazis, he knew and always warned Herman’s father when there was a raid coming. All except once when he was prevented, it was impossible, and this caused him to be accused of collaboration after the war. Herman’s father wrote a letter exonerating him.

Mies said that after her father lost his job, he made himself a job as a scribe and interpreter of bureaucracy, someone who took on the bureaucracy for people who needed help. For all the world it sounded like being a despachante in Brazil. (I’d lived in Brazil for three years. A despachante is a fixer.)

But the problem for many people was their jobs. It would have been more honorable to quit even low-level bureaucratic jobs in the government or the railways (which shipped Jews to concentration camps) and some people did. But most didn’t, because they didn’t know/couldn’t imagine how else to support their families. Some young men who were called up in the later years of the war to go in labour brigades to Germany, or even as soldiers, did everything they could to get exempted and went underground if they failed. But many couldn’t afford to live underground—it cost—and they went along reluctantly. Some went voluntarily however, saying they had to get a job somehow—although Mies said they came back saying they’d been press-ganged, forced, and couldn’t leave once there. They were imprisoned. Not true, but it was face-saving.

This was her strongest point: that while some brave Dutch worked in the resistance, most people in the country went along with the occupation not knowing what else to do, hating it, hoping the war would soon be over, but doing it all the same. I wonder if that’s partly why they hate Germans here, the fact the Nazis made them into their worst selves, or made them see their worst sides daily. And they do hate Germans. The way I’m treated when they only see my name! Marianne: “I won’t speak to Germans. I don’t like them. I won’t have them in my house,” I was there only because once again I’d explained how the name, Krueger, came into our family.

The meticulous organization of the Nazis! Drawing everyone in. Mies said no one thought anything of it near the beginning of the occupation when the Germans had them fill out forms listing the names of both their parents and their four grandparents. Just for record-keeping, they said. Six months later, anyone with a grandfather named Abraham or something like it got an identity card stamped with a big J. Some of these people didn’t even know they were part Jewish. (Some weren’t.) And from there, their liberty was eroded. First they couldn’t hold government jobs, then they had to wear stars, turn in their bikes, not go here, not go there—on and on. This progression is of course well-recorded in books if I need it. But Mies’s point was, the Nazis were meticulous, they were clever, and they were slow—up to a point—and people slowly went along, even though they hated it. 

Back to the Nazis, the 15 in Mies’s village. One had a badly hunched back, one was a nasty pharmacist—she called them people with small jobs and low self-esteem; she said the cliché about this was true. When people stopped going to the Nazi’s pharmacy he went bankrupt and got even more bitter, but got a Nazi job. The Nazis gave them power for the first time in their lives, along with extra ration coupons and special privileges. You had to watch even the expression on your face when you were with them, although it was easier in the countryside where you knew who they were. In the city, if someone told a Nazi joke on the tram, you froze, you felt panicked. Who was that man who wasn’t smiling? Would he report you for not reporting the jokester? It was dangerous to even hear a casual remark. You retreated from these people, although they were everywhere. 

Meanwhile, the resistance grew and grew sophisticated and began to hide Jews, help them out of the country; to hide conscripted boys and others in trouble; to sabotage and even kill the Nazis and their collaborators. Many in the resistance were young, like the Canadian soldiers who marched in to liberate the country. They could do it, not having families to support. Instead they had families who supported them.

And here Mies began talking about Anne Frank and others in hiding in the Annex.

To be continued.