Bep was responsible for milk deliveries, which happened daily. Supposedly, the office staff drank a great deal of milk. The milkman asked no questions. But as the food shortages increased—the Germans were sending a lot of Dutch produce back to Germany—Bep would ride her bike out to the farms that surrounded the city to find whatever food she could.
On one occasion on her way back into the city with the few potatoes and vegetables she’d been able to buy, she was stopped by a passing patrol of SS. She made herself understood in German and told the young officer who approached her that she had a large family to feed. He let her go but took half her produce. Then the patrol car caught up with her again, and the officer returned the food.
Bep was sharp enough to know that it was a trap. Instead of heading for the Annex, she went home. The car followed her. She gave the SS her most innocent look and hastened into the house. They drove away.14
Bep and Miep became very close to Anne, as is clear from her diary. Both gave in to her entreaties for them to spend the night in the Annex. Bep described the time spent there as “completely and utterly horrifying.” Lying on a mattress beside Anne, she could hear the bells of the nearby Westerkerk toll every fifteen minutes, shattering the quiet in the rooms:
A beam or a door would creak, then it was something outside on the canal, a gust of wind moving a tree, or a car in the distance coming closer. . . . Each squeak and crack . . . was associated with “I’ve been betrayed” or “they’ve heard me now.”15
The fear was almost insupportable.
Miep also stayed overnight with her husband. After the blackout frames went up, sealing the Annex like a prison with the locks on the inside, Miep and Jan went to bed in Anne’s room. Miep later wrote:
All through the night I heard each ringing of the Westertoren clock. I never slept; I couldn’t close my eyes. I heard the sound of a rainstorm begin, the wind come up. The quietness of the place was overwhelming. The fright of these people who were locked up here was so thick I could feel it pressing down on me. It was like a thread of terror pulled taut. It was so terrible it never let me close my eyes.
For the first time I knew what it was like to be a Jew in hiding.16
11
A Harrowing Incident
Eight people hiding in a small space for twenty-five months—it was amazing that they lasted so long. As Bep put it, “Eight persons are eight individuals. If each one of them committed a single slip each year, that would be sixteen telltale signs.”1 Sometimes domestic arguments broke out during office hours. Bep would recognize the voices and rush to warn the hiders that they could be heard in the warehouse. Once when her father, who was the warehouse manager, heard voices, he started raging at an employee to cover the noise while Bep raced upstairs to keep the peace; the poor worker had no idea what he’d done.2 It was all agonizing.
The world had gone insane, but Otto kept a modicum of calm. Miep noted the change: “I noticed a new composure, a new calm about Mr. Frank. Always a nervous man before, he now displayed a veneer of total control, a feeling of safety and calm emanated from him. I could see that he was setting a calm example for the others.”3
There was need for calm. Up until March 1943, Bep’s father took care of everything. He always made sure to dispose of the trash carefully and covered up any signs that there were hiders in the Annex. However, that June he was diagnosed with cancer. He continued to work for a brief time, but, as Anne wrote in her diary, he had surgery on June 15 and was forced to leave work so he could recuperate.
Unable to find a replacement on his own, Kleiman consulted the public employment office, which sent him a man named Willem van Maaren. It was risky bringing a total stranger into the closed world of the secret Annex, and Kleiman would soon regret his decision. Van Maaren was suspiciously inquisitive, and the helpers would come to believe that he was stealing supplies from the warehouse that he then sold on the black market.
The change of warehouse manager was probably the most dangerous threat to the Annex residents since they’d gone into hiding, although there were many other things for the helpers to worry about: obtaining food stamps from the resistance （according to Miep, Jan had to take everyone’s identity cards to the resistance organization to prove that he was feeding eight people）; finding extra money to buy food; and, as rationing increased, finding food at all.
To make matters worse, businesses all over Amsterdam were being robbed. There were at least three break-in attempts at Prinsengracht 263 between 1943 and 1944. On July 16, 1943, as was his custom, Peter went down to the warehouse before the employees arrived, only to discover that the front doors were open. Thieves had forced both the warehouse and the street doors with a crowbar. Ironically, everyone in the Annex had slept through it all. The robbers had reached the second floor and stolen a small amount of money, blank checks, and, most depressing, food coupons amounting to the Annex’s entire allotment of sugar.