After decades of silence, Joop van Wijk renewed contact with his aunt Nelly in 1996. She was living in the small village of Koudum in the province of Friesland in the northern Netherlands and was still in close contact with her sisters, particularly Diny and Willy. Joop recalled, “I was always welcome, but this changed when I brought up the subject of the war and her behavior in the Voskuijl family.”23 Nelly understood that he was writing a book about his mother, but she said that it was difficult to speak about those times; she greatly regretted that period of her life.
Then rather startingly, Joop recounted that “One of the last times I visited her and mentioned Anne Frank and the raid on the Annex, she had a serious fainting spell.”24 He offered to take her to the hospital, but she refused and told him that her fainting was probably a result of the blows her father had given her. Joop was suspicious, believing his aunt was not above using a dramatic performance to obscure her culpability. However, he told the Cold Case Team that, fearing for her health, he stopped asking about the war.
Of course, the most surprising aspect of Joop’s account is that it seems that all he had to do was mention the Annex and Nelly fainted. Could that have been a ruse, Nelly’s way of getting out of having to respond? But he also recounted that he’d actually seen her faint on three earlier occasions, which suggests that she might have had some kind of chronic condition. In his book Anne Frank: The Untold Story: The Hidden Truth About Eli Vossen, the Youngest Helper of the Secret Annex he also mentioned the fainting incident but said that it was occasioned by his mentioning the war and not the raid on the Annex. The Cold Case Team was left wondering: Was Nelly hiding things with her fainting spells and her refusal to speak?25 Or did Joop, already convinced that his aunt was guilty, have tunnel vision? After Joop’s last visit, Nelly moved to an assisted living residence, where she died in 2001. Joop received a final postcard from her with the short text “An embrace, Nel.”
Calling on his twenty-seven years of experience as an FBI undercover agent, Vince said he’d learned to read people—for his own safety. He liked Joop very much, but he felt he was somehow obsessed with proving his aunt Nelly’s guilt. Vince told him not to worry about the betrayal; he should focus on celebrating his mother and grandfather, which had been his motive for writing Anne Frank: The Untold Story.
As expected, Vince went about his investigation coolly, applying the law enforcement axiom “knowledge, motive, and opportunity” to the Nelly Voskuijl scenario. Did Nelly have a motive? Joop visited his aunt fifty years after the war ended, at which point Nelly seemed ashamed of her younger self, but back then, she was rebellious, thoughtless, combative, flirting with the enemy. Could she, in a moment of rage—after a fight with her father, for example—have told the wrong person about the secret her father and sister were keeping? And did that person, possibly one of her German friends, then pass the information on to the SD?
Did she have knowledge? Though her father and sister were very discreet, it’s possible that she overheard them talking about the bookcase. Perhaps she grew suspicious of the goods Bep always seemed to be collecting, sometimes with the help of her siblings. But even Bep’s mother didn’t know about the hiders in the Annex. When she found out after they were arrested, she was furious that her husband and daughter had put their family into such jeopardy.
Nelly had opportunity, having returned to Amsterdam in May 1944. Her father complained that she was still meeting her German friends.
But the team was skeptical that Nelly might have been lashing out at her father, Johannes, when they discovered that the details she’d requested be redacted from Anne’s diary were affectionate toward him. More likely, by 1986 she did not want her past as a German sympathizer known, which could have been damaging not only to herself but also to her father’s memory and to that of her sister Bep, both of whom were now celebrated as helpers in the Anne Frank story.
It seemed that there was no substantial proof that Nelly, however inadvertently, betrayed the residents in the secret Annex. But the Cold Case Team was not yet ready to set that scenario aside.
29
Probing Memory
Vince reminded me that anyone relying on eyewitness statements as an accurate record of a historical moment will quickly learn that memory is fluid. People claim things with great certainty that either are contradictory or simply cannot be true. They are not lying; rather, their memory has been polluted by experiences they have gone through later. The same moment filtered through different emotions can also change the so-called objective record. Vince said that every time the Cold Case Team recorded a scenario, they had to take that fact into account. One of the most compelling cases was that of Victor Kugler.