Thijs left the crowd in front of the Anne Frank House and made a decision: he would begin a public conversation. Amsterdam was no longer a bastion of individualism. Where there was once tolerance, now there is distrust. At what point do we give up on one another? Whom do we stand up for? And for whom do we not stand up? The betrayal of Anne Frank would be the way into that conversation. Thijs told me that there is a sixty-foot-high mural in the north of Amsterdam that overlooks almost the entire city. It is a portrait of Anne with a quote from her diary: “Let me be myself.” “I think she’s talking to us,” he said.
Thijs wanted to show me something. We strolled to the nearby Torensluis, one of the widest bridges in Amsterdam, crossing over the Singel canal. Looming in front of me was a large sculpture on a marble plinth. Thijs said this was the nineteenth-century author Eduard Douwes Dekker, considered to be one of the Netherlands’ greatest authors. He was famous for his novel denouncing the abuses of colonialism in the Dutch East Indies. When Thijs added that the sculpture had been made by his father, Hans Bayens, I was taken aback. A number of his father’s sculptures are scattered through Amsterdam, Utrecht, Zwolle, and other cities.
Thijs explained that his father had rarely spoken of the war. It had been too traumatic. His mother said that years after the war ended, his father would often wake in the midst of a nightmare, his hands reaching toward the window, screaming that bombers were flying overhead.
Thijs never met his grandparents; both died before he was born. But he’d heard stories. What had left the greatest impression on him was his discovery that their house had been a doorgangshuis （transit place）， used by the resistance to hide Jews. There were always a number of Jews hiding in their basement, some for weeks at a time, while the resistance looked for more permanent addresses where they could go underground.
When he started the Anne Frank project, Thijs spoke to his father’s best friend to ask him what he remembered about the war. The friend told him to interview ninety-three-year-old Joop Goudsmit, who had stayed with Thijs’s grandparents throughout the war. Goudsmit had become part of the Bayens family and was able to describe the house, the room in the basement where he had hidden, the banned radio concealed under the floorboards in the closet, and the number of Jews who had come through. He said that the risks the Bayenses had taken, including contacts with forgers of identity cards, had been extreme.
It’s baffling to think that Thijs’s father never told him about that, but it was typical. After the war, so many claimed, falsely, to have been involved with the resistance that those who took the real risks, such as Thijs’s grandparents, often preferred to remain silent. But the war had shaped Thijs’s family, and he recognized that the search for what had led to the raid on the secret Annex would enable him to enter the labyrinth of his own family history. Anne Frank’s is an iconic story, but it is also a terrifyingly familiar one, repeated hundreds of thousands of times throughout Europe. Thijs said he also saw it as a warning. “This must never be allowed to happen again,” he said.
Part I
The Background Story
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 “Jew-hunting unit,” was sitting in his office on Euterpestraat in Amsterdam when the phone rang. He’d been about to go out for a bite to eat but answered anyway, something he’d later regret. It was his superior officer, Lieutenant Julius Dettmann, also a German, who said he’d 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 who’d 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 that’s absolutely certain is that they found eight people in hiding: Otto Frank, his wife, Edith, and their two daughters, Anne and Margot; Frank’s 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）。* They’d been diving under for two years and thirty days.