Anne Frank – our child of the Holocaust, our emblem of Jewish sacrifice – was hidden for two years in a cramped annexe at the top of a tall Amsterdam house, with two families, hers and the van Pels, and later the dentist Fritz Pfeiffer. Forced to speak in undertones to avoid discovery, they were hidden by non-Jewish people of ultimate courage and humanity, only to be finally betrayed and sent to the death camps.
The betrayer, according to a new book published this week, The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan, was a notary called Van den Bergh, a member of their Jewish community who saved his own life and that of his family by selling theirs. The revelation follows six years of investigation by a former FBI agent.
Betrayal is one of the worst nouns in any language. It is also one of the bywords of the Holocaust, in which every noble quality of humanity is turned on its head, forcing Jews to give others up to save their own skin. Turning Jew against Jew was the most cynical aspect of Nazi evil, far worse than death at the hands of others. This was the Nazis’ symphonic finale - turning Jews into kapos, giving them lists and statistics, playing a game of devil’s poker with them.
The betrayal of a young girl, this child-writer who could not speak her truth aloud but repeated it silently to her best friend, Kitty, her diary, in which she revealed all the stresses of a life intensified by captivity with others whose company she found impossible to bear. And against all this the background of terror – awaiting that fateful Nazi knock on the door which would end it all.
In her diary Anne emerged from the chrysalis of childhood into her seething adolescence, pouring out her thoughts, her fears, her dreams, her burgeoning sexuality. We read of her anguish and yet her eternal optimism – “In spite of everything I believe people are really good at heart” – shines through like the sun itself.
But Anne was betrayed with her family and the others. It is believed she died of typhus in Bergen Belsen at the age of 15. According to Daniel Finklestein in today’s Times, when the Nazi officer arrested them her diary flew out of the suitcase he snatched to put in whatever gold and valuables he could scramble together, leaving the true valuable – the diary – on the floor. His greed saved that diary’s pure and innocent testimony for all mankind. Her father, Otto Frank, the sole survivor of the family, brought it to the world’s attention. But Otto kept a bitter secret from his family. The name on an anonymous note of their betrayer – a Jew from the Jewish council set up by the Nazis for that specific purpose – to betray other Jews.
His identity as the betrayer is not proven, but it gives us all pause for thought. As a minority in every country except Israel, community is a word that is sacrosanct to us. The Jewish community, the link across the diaspora that, even if we don’t always get on, is something that always binds us together, protecting us, insulating us.
But hearing that one of us was Anne’s betrayer as we approach Holocaust Memorial Day is probably something we would rather not know, just as Otto Frank preferred his family not to know. Yet we do now know and we can’t un-know it. A double tragedy in which you can perceive the twisted smile of the antisemite, returning us to that elemental poisoned chalice - the fear that this knowledge will hand a gift to antisemites everywhere.
But as the evil spread through Nazi Europe in the 1940s, as the cracked gloss of civilisation shattered, Jews could only huddle together to save themselves Whoever the betrayer was, Van Den Bergh or another member of the Jewish community, he took that guilt to the grave with him. What self-forgiveness, what absolution was possible after this? He was a marked man by default; like the scapegoat our ancestors sent into the wilderness with the imprint of all our hands on its body, bearing human sins, unknowing, scared and ultimately innocent. The betrayer is as much a victim as anyone else.
