Miep and Margot rode their bicycles to the Annex the morning of June 6. Otto, Edith, and Anne soon followed on foot. The long walk from their apartment at 37 Merwedeplein in the River Quarter to Prinsengracht in central Amsterdam was exhausting, particularly because they were wearing multiple layers of clothing. A Jew carrying a suitcase would arouse suspicion. But it was raining fiercely, a consolation since the Nazis would not be out checking for Jews in such weather.
As Miep left the Frank family to settle in, she described closing the door to the Annex behind her:
I couldn’t begin to imagine what they must be feeling to have walked away from everything they owned in the world—their home; a lifetime of gathered possessions; Anne’s little cat, Moortje. Keepsakes from the past. And friends.
They had simply closed the door of their lives and had vanished from Amsterdam. Mrs. Frank’s face said it all. Quickly, I left them.13
10
You Were Asked. You Said Yes.
In her diary, Anne Frank offers a poignant description of living, in effect, imprisoned in the Annex. Messages of dread penetrated its walls. Sometimes she could hear jackboots ringing against the pavement in sinister rhythm as German soldiers marched by. Once she described peeking through the curtains in the office after the staff had gone home and seeing Jewish people scuttling past in fear. In the evenings, as the war progressed, RAF planes would fly over the Netherlands on their way to Germany, and the humming sound of their engines and the boom of the antiaircraft guns were frightening.* Often USAF Mustang fighters dumped empty fuel tanks over the city to gain speed and maneuverability. The unexpected noise of unexploded shells and shrapnel falling from the skies and hitting the ground was continual.
On the streets of Amsterdam there was a different kind of fear. Miep described it:
Recently the Green Police and SS had been making surprise razzias during the day. This was the best time to catch the most defenseless Jews at home: the old, the sick, small children. Many had taken to the streets so as not to be in their homes if the Germans came for them. They often asked passersby if they’d seen any sign of a roundup or soldiers, and, if so, where.
It was not hard to see what was going on, but after the brutal German reprisals against the railway strikers, fear pervaded everyone. Most people looked away. They knew they had “to be prudent.” However much they wanted to help, they went inside and shut their doors.1
One of the most eloquent testimonies of life outside the Annex comes from Miep, but it took her forty-two years of reticence before she could speak of the events, so painful was her sense of loss and failure. According to her son, it was a wound that couldn’t heal.
She recalled that in the early days of the occupation, before the Frank family went into hiding, Otto had been forced not only to Aryanize his businesses but also to let his only Jewish employee, Esther, go.
I remember Esther said good-bye to us. She had to leave because she was Jewish. Dismissed. Yes, that’s the way things were. She did not come back, I think. She did not survive the war. She was still there on my wedding day. . . . She gave me a box with a mirror, comb and brush from her and her family. . . . She could not keep it anymore. . . . It was all so painful, you see. You heard about her dismissal but did not talk about it further. You did not know what was going to happen. You gave into that. Had to accept it. The Germans were the boss, and you were scared—-frightened to death.2
Only gradually did the psychology of living under occupation change. When Otto asked the staff for help, their motive to do so was simple: he was their friend, and they had to help. Thus they learned to live in separate worlds, to split themselves into different parts: they were one person in the Annex, another among friends, yet another among officials.3 As Miep explained, you soon learned what to say, what not to say: “We were no longer keeping silent. We had lost the habit of speech. Do you understand the difference?”4
Jan continued to work for the Social Services Authority, but he was soon involved with the NSF resistance group, though after the war ended, he rarely spoke about what he’d done. He did explain his motive when he was asked. What moved a person from passivity to action, he said, was not heroism. It was simpler. You were asked. You said yes. The issue then became whom to trust. “You never really knew who to trust . . . [but] somehow you knew anyway.”
We knew, for example, those people on the other side of the street, they are good. Why? That is hard for us to say. You see things . . . hear things. You hear people talking, and this is how you figure out the value of certain individuals. That is not a one-hundred percent rule but in general it worked for me. I was lucky. . . . You had to be very limited in your contacts. Not speak with the whole neighborhood. And then, of course, you needed a bit of luck, as well. But I have been damned careful in talking about anything, because you could never be sure. And I have actually never been wrong about a person, after all.5