She was released without explanation and continued her train journey to the small town of Sprundel, where she was met by a Professor Ruijgrok, who took her to the Bastiaensen family, who’d agreed to hide her. They were Catholic and very welcoming. But children in hiding could not expect stability. Anne-Marie was suddenly moved again after word came that German soldiers were to be lodged with the family. The resistance then placed her with the Sadee family in the city of Breda, where she stayed for about six weeks before rejoining the Bastiaensens after the Germans vacated their house. She stayed with them until the liberation.
Esther said that her mother didn’t want to leave the Bastiaensens after the war ended. She’d come to think of their children as her stepsisters and stepbrothers and even wanted to become Catholic. Eventually the Bastiaensens were able to convince her to rejoin her own family in Amsterdam, but she kept in contact with members of the family long after the war.
This is Esther’s version of her mother’s story, and it closely matches the information the Cold Case Team uncovered in her grandfather’s file.4 In his testimony to the Dutch authorities, Van den Bergh said that his daughter was arrested in Rotterdam on her way to her hiding address. He said that she was imprisoned for nine days and was released because her identity papers did not carry the letter J. However, he did not mention that he had told his daughter to use the name Alois Miedl if she got into trouble.5 Perhaps he understood that in the postwar era, indicating that he’d had a strong relationship with a well-known Nazi would not reflect well on him.
When the Cold Case Team asked Esther if she knew more about Miedl, she recalled that he was an art collector and had a Jewish wife. Esther’s grandfather collected seventeenth-and eighteenth-century paintings by famous artists, and he and Miedl would go to art auctions together. She also recalled that Miedl was the person who purchased the Goudstikker art collection around the time of the German invasion. He then sold the collection to Hitler’s close henchman Hermann G?ring. Esther did remember once seeing a wartime photo on the internet of G?ring leaving Miedl’s office. However, she seemed unaware that her grandfather was the notary who officiated over G?ring’s purchase of the collection.
Esther used to visit her grandmother and aunts regularly. She remembered that when she opened the door to her grandmother’s house, it felt like walking into the Rijksmuseum. The walls were covered in paintings from the school of Jan Steen and others. After her grandmother died in 1968, Esther had the task of going through their Amsterdam home. She found many documents, but her grandfather’s collection of valuable paintings seemed to have disappeared （she is still trying to trace them）。 She told Thijs that there was a suitcase full of documents that had sat in her grandfather’s house for forty years. But as had happened in Abraham Kaper’s house, there was an accident and everything was destroyed in a house fire caused by a gas leak.
Esther was eventually invited to the Cold Case Team’s office in Amsterdam-Noord, where Vince and Brendan interviewed her.6 Finally, they showed her the anonymous note that identified her grandfather as the betrayer of the Frank family. She was visibly shocked. “What would motivate someone to send such a note?” she asked.
She told them that after the war there was a great deal of anger directed against the Jewish Council. She said that her grandmother rarely spoke about the war and there were never any accusations about her grandfather within the family. But she also said she’d personally received verbally abusive anonymous phone calls about the Jewish Council well after her grandfather’s death.
“Why would someone betray others like this?” she wondered aloud again. Her grandfather must have been forced to cooperate with the Germans, but she could not imagine him betraying Otto Frank. Reading the note carefully, she realized that it referred to lists, not specific people. Yes, she could imagine this. If indeed her grandfather gave up the Prinsengracht 263 address, it was probably just an address on an impersonal list; he didn’t know who was living there. If in fact he had done it, she said finally, she knew it could have been for only one reason: because he was forced, because he had to save his family’s lives.
41
The Goudstikker Affair
Esther’s comments about her grandfather’s connection to the Goudstikker affair, the most famous art collection “acquisition” in World War II, coincided with what the Cold Case Team had discovered. Her account also contributed to the growing sense that Van den Bergh might well have been involved in the Franks’ betrayal.1