It was an interesting hypothesis, but it didn’t hold up. The records show that the woman was arrested for violating curfew, which was at 8:00 p.m. However, it was still light out until 9:30, so there was likely nothing sinister about her walking around at that hour; she didn’t seem to pose any danger. Besides, that late in the war, when everyone knew that the Germans were in trouble, the average beat cop would probably not have bothered to get mixed up with the Dutch SD detectives of the dreaded Jew-hunting unit. When the war was over, everyone wanted to have been on the right side.
24
Another Theory
In 2018, a message came into the office from an older Dutch gentleman who declared that Vince and his team were wasting their time trying to solve the Annex arrest because he already knew what had happened. After a few emails, Pieter established telephone contact with Gerard Kremer, who, as a small child, grew up at Westermarkt 2, the same stately building that housed two floors of Wehrmacht offices, around the corner from the comic book store from whose attic Vince and Brendan observed the interior courtyard and the back of the Annex.
As was typical of that Dutch neighborhood, Westermarkt 2 was a building that housed several different businesses and residences. Kremer’s father, Gerardus Sr., worked there as a caretaker and lived with his wife and son on the sixth floor. The third and fourth floors were occupied by a Wehrmacht unit that collected confiscated goods from the Netherlands for shipment to Germany. Part of the cellar was also requisitioned for the storage of food and medical equipment.
In May 2018, Kremer’s book De achtertuin van het achterhuis （The Backyard of the Annex） was released, and although it met with some skepticism, it also created a sensation. He had written it as an homage to his parents and their resistance work. He claimed that his mother and father secretly pilfered food from the cellar of Westermarkt 2 and with the help of a Dr. Lam, a physician who had an office in an adjacent building, distributed food packages to the resistance. Once acquired, items such as cheese and dry goods would be lowered with a hoist and rope from the Westermarkt 2 building to the small courtyard of Dr. Lam’s residence on the Keizersgracht. The stolen items were then distributed by the resistance, including to the people in the Annex. When Pieter asked Kremer how his father had known that people were hiding in the Annex, he repeated a story his father had told about seeing and hearing the girls from the Annex loudly playing around the chestnut tree in the courtyard.1 In addition to helping the Annex residents with food, Dr. Lam was supposedly providing medical services.
Although finding a new supplier of food to the Annex piqued the team’s interest, the part of Kremer’s story that Pieter most wanted to hear was his version of the raid. Kremer claimed that his father had recognized a frequent visitor to their building as the infamous Jewish V-Frau Anna “Ans” van Dijk. Using the false name of Ans de Jong, she often came to drink coffee with the secretaries at the Wehrmacht office. Gerardus Sr. once greeted her and mentioned that he recognized her from the hat shop Maison Evany, where she’d worked before the war. But the woman insisted that he was mistaken and walked away.
In describing the raid on the Annex, Kremer maintained that in early August 1944, his father overheard snippets of a phone call Ans van Dijk made to the SD reporting that she’d heard children’s voices coming from a house on Prinsengracht. Supposedly that phone call resulted in the raid.
Gerard Jr.’s wife obtained that remarkable account from Gerardus Sr. just before his passing in 1978 as a kind of deathbed confession. Oddly enough, she did not inform her husband of that statement until years later. Gerard Jr. held on to the revelation for several years before deciding to publish the account in his 2018 book.2
Kremer’s father was arrested over a month after the Annex raid. According to Gerard Jr., his father believed he was betrayed by Ans van Dijk, though that was never proven. The family assumed that his arrest was related to his assisting Jews in hiding. He was taken to the SD headquarters on Euterpestraat and tortured. Dr. Lam was also arrested but was released a short time later. Gerardus Sr. ended up in the notorious Nazi prison the Weteringschans, but luckily a German officer who lived in the same building as the Kremer family at Westermarkt 2 put in a good word for him. Gerardus Sr. was released on October 23, 1944, the same day that an SD officer, Herbert Oelschl?gel, was murdered by the resistance. The very next morning, twenty-nine men were selected from the prison Gerardus Sr. had been held in, transported to the south of the city, and executed as a reprisal for the killing.