The second and final excerpt from my journal about meeting with Dutch writer Mies Bouhuys in April, 2000, this time about the betrayal of Anne Frank. That’s her photo above. I’ve written a number of pieces about the issue lately, and a link at the bottom of this page will take you to the first. Once again, I’ve cleaned up the hasty writing in a few places, especially as this long entry proceeds, but the content remains the same. I’m also including an afterward, given the pushback I’ve received about these posts.

And here Mies began talking about Anne Frank and others in hiding in the Annex. She knew Otto Frank and especially knew Miep Gies, one of the people who hid him and his family. She’s still alive but “not herself. Some dementia, poor Miep.” Although here’s a discrepancy: Mies thought she was in her late eighties, although the Melissa Müller Anne Frank biography, whose theory about the betrayal this counters, puts her in her nineties; 41 when her son Paul was born in 1950. Worthwhile to keep these discrepancies in mind. (In fact, Miep Gies was 91 at the time.) I don’t know how well Mies Bouhuys really knows all this—how well she really knew Otto Frank—although it’s true she’s on the board of the Anne Frank House museum and that she wrote a biography of Anne.

She said she first asked Otto Frank how different Anne Frank would have been from other children at four years of age. Was she “herself” by then? Try two, Otto Frank answered. Her older sister Margot was always quiet and remarkably well behaved, but by the time Anne was two, it was clear she was different. The girls had identical white rabbit fur coats and muffs to go out when they were little in Frankfurt (the Franks were originally German) and five minutes after Anne put hers on, she got it filthy. One time their mother sat them at a table to cut pictures from magazines and Margot cut hers happily. Anne reached over and snipped off one of Margot’s braids. All through her childhood, she loved dressing up, putting on her mother’s clothes and make-up, putting on plays, leading other children. She was, according to Otto Frank, a highly intelligent, high-strung, unpredictable child.

And Mies added they were rich—richer than Müller makes them out in her biography. The local girl they hired in Frankfurt, Gertrud Nauman—obviously an important source for Müller—was a girl who loved playing with little children, and part of the Frank family. According to Mies, she was hired when not much more than a child herself as the children’s maid. (The Franks had a nanny, housekeeper and gardener as well.)

I wonder if this is downplayed in writing about the Franks to keep away from the anti-Semitic “rich Jew” stereotypes or whether Mies Bouhuys was exaggerating. I didn’t think so. Her husband was Jewish, I believe, and was sent to Dachau for that and for his role in the resistance.

(The references above are to Melissa Müller, author of Anne Frank, A Biography. It had been published in 1998 and it seemed to bother Mies Bouhuys, who kept bringing it up. When I pulled it off the bookshelf this morning, I noticed that Mies isn’t thanked in the acknowledgements, whether because they didn’t speak during Müller’s research or because that had some disagreement, I don’t know.)

So that’s the picture Mies gave of the Frank family. Then they went into hiding, like many in the Netherlands—although more, she said, in Belgium. So they came under the care of the people working in the warehouse office, and Mies said these weren’t just simple souls saving eight Jews. Miep Gies’s husband Jan Gies was one of the leaders of the armed resistance, leading raids on Nazi record-keeping offices, for instance. Another member of the armed resistance working at the warehouse was Victor Kugler, one of the ones who went to Canada after the war. Mies said many members of the Dutch armed resistance went to Canada. They couldn’t face staying in Holland. She knew one man who had stayed who was always agonized later. During the war, he would bicycle up to a policeman he had known all his life and shoot him because he knew the policeman was about to turn in five Jews. Five lives for one. But he couldn’t face the family afterwards.

Meanwhile Miep and Jan hid someone else in their home throughout the war. Müller says a young Dutch man facing forced labour; Mies said a Jewish woman. Miep Gies also carried letters between the dentist hiding in the Annex with the Franks (Fritz Pfeffer) and his lover, back and forth almost every day. She didn’t tell Otto Frank either of these things. The letters were discovered in a flea market after the war once the lover had died and her effects were sold. (Fritz Pfeiffer died in the Holocaust.)

Once, Mies said, Miep Gies was carrying a letter when a Nazi on a motorcycle nearly hit her. She swore, “German bastard,” forgetting herself. Fortunately he didn’t stop and search her and find the letter, and the secret didn’t get out, not then.

When it did, she says it was through the warehouseman named in Müller’s book as the original suspect, Willem van Maaren, a thief who snuck in at night to steal sugar and heard voices. Müller says in her book that he was a thief and he heard the Franks etc. and gossiped, but that it was the cleaning-lady wife of another warehouseman who made the call to the Nazis, betraying the eight Jews in the annex behind the warehouse. Müller also said Otto Frank attended the second investigation of the SS officer, Karl Silberbauer, who led the raid. This investigation was in 1963. But Müller says Otto Frank didn’t speak to him and it never came out (through Silberbauer) who the informant was. 

(And here I can still hear Mies saying, “Of course he did,” although I didn’t write it down.) 

She said that Otto Frank indeed spoke to the German (which seems far more likely. All that time, all that agony, and you wouldn’t?). He asked, did van Maaren tell you? Yes, the Nazi replied, providing details.

But Mies said Otto Frank decided not to make this public for the sake of his children… This man had four children, and life for the innocent children of collaborators has been—and is—awful in Holland. There was a famous case where a rising young actor stopped getting work when it was discovered that his father had been a Dutch Nazi official, the head of what I think she called the Nazi-run General Workers’ Union. He committed suicide at 35. So Otto Frank decided for the sake of the children not to make it public that their father had effectively killed Anne Frank, who by then was famous and revered.

This sounds as if it might be true. Why would Otto Frank have resisted the urge to ask? As I say, it’s human; he must have. Yet it seems in character that he kept quiet afterward, and that Miep Gies kept quiet—even perhaps that she obfuscated with Müller, who’s young and was hellbent on writing an Anne Frank biography, and probably knew on some level she needed a hook and new information, a new suspect, not the same old-same old. So perhaps she came up with a theory that the cleaning-lady wife called the Nazis, a theory that Miep Geis might have let pass (the woman had no children) in preference to the truth, given Otto Frank’s known opinion and good reasons. 

Müller might also have been right. I’m not one to know. (In fact, Müller later recanted her theory about the cleaner.) But somehow the van Maaren theory sounds more complete. He was a thief and a black marketeer, and Mies Bouhuys said they got paid per Jew turned in, lots of money at the time.

Miep Gies, by the way, never said a word about carrying the dentist’s letters until they turned up in the flea market.

One final point Mies Bouhuys made here: That after the eight were arrested, Miep Gies got 20,000 guilders from the resistance, an enormous sum, and went to the SS office to try to buy their freedom from Silberbauer. He told her to wait, he’d see her. Mies said it took unheard-of bravery for Miep to do this, although it was nearing the end of the war, the Nazis were clearly losing, bribes were being taken, Germans preparing nest eggs in order to flee, “and Miep was a very pretty girl.”

She waited an hour, but there were other SS types there with Silberbauer, they wouldn’t leave—drinking or something—and finally one of them opened a door and saw her and said to get lost. So she had to. And the people in the annex were lost indeed. 

Müller tells a version of this story. I hadn’t mentioned the book to Mies. I’d gone there to talk about the war and collaborators, and what Canadian soldiers might have seen. But the talk rambled this way, and she started speaking of hiding Jews and Anne Frank, and from there I only asked a couple of questions. Were the people around her ordinary folk or part of an organized group? Do you know what she was like? I wasn’t taking notes, much less tape-recording our talk. My questions were ones which she as a fiction writer recognized. “Would the soldiers have seen any cats or were they…” “Eaten.”

Yet altogether it shoots down any danger of being asked to write a novel about the person who turned in Anne Frank. I was aware that publishers might ask me to do that, given the basic idea. (My plan had always been to write a book about a collaborator living next door to a girl in Toronto after the war, someone who had betrayed a member of the resistance.) I knew the media would like it. But I had qualms about exploitation. The word in my head was vulgar. 

Irrelevant. They know who turned them in, whether the thief van Maaren (sounds likely) or the cleaning lady (possible), and since I know they know, I can shoot it down if anybody asks. I saw that as I talked to Mies. (She couldn’t have been putting me off it consciously, I don’t think. How could she know that this might come up? Or had she met writers with the Anne Frank idea and was used to putting them off? I don’t think so, too convoluted, although I suppose it’s an outside possibility.) 

All of which–I add in 2023–is worth thinking about in the context of this long article about the use of Anne Frank in fiction, written in 2018 by Talya Zax in The Forward.

Yet I think my core idea of writing about a collaborator living next door remains valid, and I went on to ask questions about what happened to them after the war…

And so she talked to me, God really knows why. Tough cookie, though. I bet if I published this, she’d deny it. The whole Anne Frank House and Fonds would deny it… I imagine the Otto Frank story is known in a select circle but it’s certainly not public knowledge. Privileged information; I think that’s the term. So much of it that I’m running out of paper, and will close for today. 

A note added on August 15, 2023:

Since I began writing this series of posts, I’ve heard from a journalist in the Netherlands vociferously disputing what Mies Bouyhus told me. She suggests that I’d confused Willem van Maaren’s name with that of another long-time suspect named Job Janson, who had four children, when van Maaren had only two. I didn’t mix up the names, but it’s possible that Mies Bouyhus did. Or at least, that she’d mixed up the number of children each man had.

The journalist also writes that people at the Anne Frank House discounted both these men as suspects during the 1990s. This was before I spoke to Mies Bouyhus, and if it’s true she must have known this, since she sat on the board of the Anne Frank House.The journalist also says that Anne Frank House investigators are now looking into whether the raid on the Annex was not the result of a tip from an individual. Instead, they’re considering whether the eight Jews hiding in Anne Frank’s Secret Annex were picked up in a more general sweep by the Nazis.

Meanwhile, the journalist is incensed that the Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh is named in the recent book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. I agree with her that the cold case conclusion is probably wrong and unfair, although she seems to feel that I haven’t said it strongly enough, which is perhaps a matter of interpretation.

As I’ve also said repeatedly throughout these posts, I think it’s probably impossible to definitively name a betrayer after all this time. Did Mies Bouyhus confuse two suspects? Was Otto Frank misled by the Nazi SS Oberscharführer Karl Josef Silberbauer, who led the raid on the Annex? Mies Bouyhus said that in 1963, Silberbauer gave Otto Frank the name of the man who had betrayed them. Did he give Frank the right name or the wrong one? I don’t know. Nor am I convinced that a specific Nazi operation can be uncovered in 2023 when so many people have combed through the archives for so long.

However, I also think that the crucial point to remember is that Anne Frank and the others in the Secret Annex were among the 75 per cent of Dutch Jews killed in the Holocaust. There were many, many Nazi sweeps and many individual betrayals. It was a great and awful tragedy, and now it threatens again, with both fascism and anti-Semitism on the rise around the world. Of course we want to know what happened. But perhaps more important thing is to keep it from happening again.

To read the earlier posts, start here.