Around that time, information arrived regarding the fate of the others. Fritz Pfeffer had died on December 20, 1944, in Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany. Although Otto had tried to persuade Peter van Pels to stay behind with him in the infirmary, Peter had believed he would have a better chance on the death march to evacuate Auschwitz, which the Nazis had ordered on January 19 as the Russian Army had approached. He had survived the weeklong march but died in the sick barracks of Mauthausen on May 5, two days before Germany’s unconditional surrender.9 According to an eyewitness who testified before the Red Cross, Nazi soldiers had thrown his mother, Auguste, under a train during a transport to Theresienstadt.10
Otto was told that he had been lucky to survive. But what was luck? He had lost everything. He kept sane by trying to rebuild his spice business, which proved to be impossible since spices from Indonesia were no longer available, and by helping to reunite orphaned children with their relatives.
He wrote his mother that he’d visited Jetteke Frijda, Margot’s school friend from the Jewish Lyceum, which they’d attended together after Jewish children had been banned from Dutch public schools. Jetteke was all alone. Her father and brother were dead. Her mother was in Switzerland.11 There was such overwhelming need; sometimes it was too much. Yet he did what he could to help.
“He became my father from there on; he took care of everything,” Hanneli Goslar, another orphan, said of Otto Frank.12 Her parents had been friends of the Franks in Amsterdam, and she had been one of Anne’s closest friends at school. Her mother had died in childbirth in 1942, and her father and maternal grandparents had been murdered in Bergen-Belsen.
She’d met Anne several times in Bergen-Belsen. Believing that her father had been gassed right away, Anne had stood at the barbed-wire fence that separated them and cried, “I don’t have any parents anymore.” Hanneli had lost contact with Anne when she and her younger sister had been transported to Theresienstadt. They had been on the Red Cross’s Palestine list, supposedly available to be used as “trade goods” in exchange for German prisoners of war. They had never reached the camp. Fortunately, their train had been liberated by the Russians en route.13
Otto had seen the Goslar sisters’ names on a Red Cross list of survivors and searched for them in Maastricht, where Hanneli was in the hospital. Thrilled to see that Otto wasn’t dead, the moment she saw him Hanneli blurted out, “Mr. Frank! . . . Your daughter is alive.”14 Then he told her the awful truth. It crossed her mind that had Anne known Otto was alive, she might have found the will to survive.
Otto took the girls under his wing, moving Hanneli to a hospital in Amsterdam and then arranging the necessary papers for her and her sister to travel to Switzerland to live with an uncle, even accompanying them to the airport. He could imagine the gulf of terror that could open for orphans alone.15
The last image we have of Anne Frank comes from Hanneli Goslar. She is watching Anne through the barbed-wire fence in Bergen-Belsen. “It wasn’t the same Anne. She was a broken girl. I probably was too, but it was so terrible.”16 It was February. It was cold. Anne had thrown off her clothes because she could no longer tolerate the lice. She stood naked except for a blanket covering her shoulders. Her mother and sister were dead. She believed her father was dead, too. She was delirious with typhus. She would be dead within a few days.17
Another survivor of Bergen-Belsen, a young girl who knew Anne, commented, “There it took superhuman effort to remain alive. Typhus and debilitation—well, yes. But I feel certain that Anne died of her sister’s death. Dying is so frightfully easy for anyone left alone in a concentration camp.”18
15
The Collaborators
At the end of the war, at least 11 million refugees were on the move. It was expected that a quarter of a million Dutch forced laborers would be returning to the Netherlands, and their numbers would swell with the foreign refugees seeking asylum. The Dutch government in exile in London had been preparing since 1943 to receive six hundred thousand people, among whom would be seventy thousand Jews. Borders would have to be secured and systems devised to scrutinize legitimate returnees, who would need to obtain medical, security, and customs clearance. No one wanted Communists sneaking in and destabilizing the country.1
As it turned out, officials had wildly overestimated the number of Jewish returnees. Only 5,200 Jews survived the camps and made their way back to the Netherlands. Tragically, they were treated badly. The returning Jewish survivors were denied public assistance and told to apply to international Jewish organizations for financial help. After the final deportations from Camp Westerbork in September 1944, about five hundred Jews had been left behind, while over the winter months that number had swelled to 896. Though the camp had at last been liberated by the Canadians on April 12, 1945, those people had been kept imprisoned and forced to share the facility with the roughly ten thousand newly arrested NSB members who’d been their tormentors.2 Only on June 23 had the Dutch military authorities allowed all former inmates to leave.