The hiders’ quiet composure seemed to anger the Nazi. When he ordered them to collect their things for the trip to Gestapo headquarters on Euterpestraat, Anne picked up her father’s briefcase, which held her diary. Otto Frank reported that Silberbauer grabbed the briefcase from Anne, threw her diary with the checkered cover and some loose sheets onto the floor, and filled the briefcase with the last valuables and money that Otto and the others had managed to hold on to, including Fritz Pfeffer’s little packet of dental gold. The Germans were losing the war. By now, much of the stolen booty collected for the Reich by the Jew-hunting units was ending up in someone’s private pocket.
Ironically, it was Silberbauer’s greed that saved Anne Frank’s diary. Had Anne held on to the briefcase and been allowed to keep it when they were arrested, her diary would certainly have been taken from her at SD headquarters and destroyed or lost forever.
According to Otto, it was at this moment that Silberbauer noted a gray footlocker with metal stripes beneath the window. The lid displayed the words “Leutnant d. Res. Otto Frank” （Reserve Lieutenant Otto Frank）。 “Where did you get this chest?” Silberbauer demanded. When Otto told him that he’d served as an officer in World War I, Silberbauer seemed shocked. As Otto reported:
The man became exceedingly confused. He stared at me, and finally said:
“Then why didn’t you report your status?”
I bit my lips.
“Why man you would have been treated decently! You would have been sent to Theresienstadt.”
I said nothing. Apparently he thought Theresienstadt a rest camp, so I said nothing. I merely looked at him. But he suddenly evaded my eyes, and all at once the perception came to me: Now he is standing at attention. Inwardly, this police sergeant had snapped to attention; if he dared, he might very well raise his hand to his cap in salute.
Then he abruptly turned on his heel and raced upstairs. A moment later he came running down, and then he ran up again, and so he went, up and down, up and down, calling out: “Take your time!”
He shouted these same words to us and to his agents.3
In Otto’s account it is the Nazi who loses his composure, running up and down like the Mad Hatter, while he and the others retain theirs. Otto has caught the German military cult of obedience in Silberbauer’s instinctive response to his officer status, but he may have underestimated Silberbauer’s automatic, reflexive racism. Years later, he would say, “Perhaps he [Silberbauer] might have spared us if he’d been alone.”4
This is doubtful. After he’d delivered the prisoners to the truck waiting to transport them to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation, Silberbauer returned to the building to confront one of the office workers, Miep Gies. Perhaps he’d spared her from arrest because she, like him, was Austrian, but not before lecturing her, “And weren’t you ashamed to help that Jewish trash?”5
Karl Silberbauer would later claim that it was years before he learned, by reading it in a newspaper, that among the ten people he’d arrested that day was fifteen-year-old Anne Frank.
When tracked down by an investigative journalist in 1963, Silberbauer said:
The people I took from their hiding places, did not leave an impression on me. It would have been different if it had been a man such as general De Gaulle or some major resistance member or other. Such a thing you don’t forget. If I wasn’t on the clock at the moment my colleague got a call. . . . I would never have come in contact with that Anne Frank. I still remember that I was just about to go out to eat something. And because this whole case blew up after the war, I am the one dealing with the mess. . . . I wonder who is behind all this. Probably that Wiesenthal or someone at the ministry trying to gain the favor of the Jews.6
It is hard to imagine a more despicable, emotionally cauterized response. By now Silberbauer knew very well that “that Anne Frank,” whom he’d arrested on August 4, 1944, had died of starvation and typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It was as if what mattered was not the dead child—she is incidental, not real, her suffering is insignificant—but that he is the victim. How strange that the bully, unmasked, is always awash in self-pity.
2
The Diary of Anne Frank
The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most harrowing books we will read if we read it for what it truly is: a thirteen-year-old girl’s daily account of life in hiding during the terrifying Nazi occupation of her city. Anne Frank catches every detail of the more than two years of claustrophobic life she spent with her family in the Annex attached to her father’s company.