40
The Granddaughter
For his part, Thijs was pursuing the man whose grandparents had successfully hidden Anne-Marie van den Bergh during the war. When Thijs spoke with him by phone, he was friendly and offered to provide an introduction to Van den Bergh’s granddaughter, with whom he’d kept in close contact. （To protect her privacy, we have not identified him and have followed her wishes by referring to her as Esther Kizio, the pseudonym she requested.）
On February 13, 2018, the man sent a letter to Esther to introduce Thijs. He asked whether she would like to participate in the cold case investigation and reminded her that at the end of the war, her grandparents, Arnold and his wife, together with their three children, moved to Minervalaan 72-3. It was a couple of miles from Merwedeplein, where the Frank family lived before going into hiding. On March 6, she answered. Somewhat warily, she agreed to a meeting.
Thijs described for me his drive on March 15 to Esther’s town, which is close to the North Sea coast outside Amsterdam. He said he felt very tense, knowing what was at stake. Before he left, he’d reread the 1963 police report and the note naming Arnold van den Bergh as the betrayer. Thijs could feel Esther’s reluctance; suddenly a stranger comes along who wants to talk to you about your grandfather, who, she probably knows, was on the Jewish Council, whose members were so vilified after the war.
He parked his car and rang the bell. A woman in her fifties opened the door and welcomed him. She was all warmth. While talking, she led him through a living room to the garden side of the house and the kitchen. She offered him tea. And biscuits. Ginger biscuits.
That turned out to be the first of several interviews. Esther was quite forthcoming. Though she’d never met her grandfather, who had died before she was born, she had plenty of family stories about the past.1
Esther recalled that she was nine or ten years old when her mother first spoke to her about the war. Anne-Marie told her that after the Nazi invasion, the family was protected from deportation because of her father’s position on the Jewish Council.2 However, sometime in 1943, things changed; suddenly they were at risk. （That likely occurred when the Jewish Council was abolished in late September of that year.） The family felt terrible anxiety and always had bags packed, ready to flee, to leave everything behind. Anne-Marie told Esther that that was when her grandfather turned to the resistance for help in hiding his three daughters.
The resistance always advised that it was safer for a family to split up than to go into hiding together, and Esther remembered her mother saying that she was asked if she wanted to stay with the family and she had said no. Anne-Marie had a poor relationship with her mother, whom she described as cold and socially ambitious. On the other hand, she loved her father deeply. They shared a bond rooted in their love of art and literature. As Esther put it, for Anne-Marie the death of her father was “the biggest disaster of her life. She didn’t really care about the rest.”3
The resistance placed Anne-Marie’s twin sisters on a farm outside the northern town of Scharwoude with a family named De Bruin. Anne-Marie went into hiding in Amsterdam, but the experience was dreadful. The family forced her to work, and she was given very little to eat. At one point she was so hungry that she stole food, which led to a terrible fight. Esther also understood that Anne-Marie was sexually abused, though the words were never spoken.
After Anne-Marie complained to a resistance worker who’d come to check on her, she was moved to a new location in the south of the Netherlands. The resistance worker accompanied her partway on the train journey. While waiting alone on a train station platform for the final leg of her trip, she was noticed by a Dutch man whom she remembered as wearing a German-style hat with a feather on it. With her dark hair and eyes, she must have looked Jewish to him. The man tipped off the police that there was a Jewish girl at the station.
The police picked her up, took her to a jail in Scheveningen, and placed her in a cell with other Jews. During several interrogations, she repeated the story the resistance had trained her to say if she was ever stopped. Years later, she told her daughter that she had retained her composure by staring at the photo of a happy family displayed in the office of the man who was so aggressively interrogating her.
Anne-Marie finally provided the name Alois Miedl to her interrogator, a name her father had told her to use if she was ever in trouble. Miedl was a German business associate of Van den Bergh who was involved in the acquisition of antique paintings. At the end of two weeks, Anne-Marie was the only person left in the cell. All the others had been deported.