Anne Frank, REV Ed: The Biography - Hardcover

1

THE ARREST


Hush. Be quiet. Whisper. Walk softly … take off your shoes. Who’s still in the bathroom? The water’s running. For God’s sake, don’t flush the toilet! After two years you should know better than to be so careless. Empty the chamber pots. Shove the beds back out of the way. The church bells are already ringing the half hour. When the workers arrive at 8:30, there has to be dead silence.
The usual morning ritual in the secret annex. At 6:45 the alarm clock goes off in Hermann and Auguste van Pels’s room, so loud and shrill that it wakes the Franks and Fritz Pfeffer, who sleep one floor below. A well-aimed blow from Mrs. van Pels silences the alarm. The floor creaks, softly at first, then louder. Mr. van Pels gets up, creeps down the steep stairs, and, the first in the bathroom, hurries to finish.
Anne waits in bed until she hears the bathroom door creak again. Her roommate, Fritz Pfeffer, is next. Anne sighs, relieved, enjoying these few precious moments of solitude. With eyes closed, she listens to the birdsong in the backyard and stretches in her bed. Bed is hardly the word for the narrow sofa she has lengthened by putting a chair at one end. But Anne thinks it’s luxurious. Miep Gies, who brings the Franks their groceries, has told her that others in hiding are sleeping on the floor in tiny windowless sheds or in damp cellars. Dutifully, Anne gets up and opens the blackout curtains. Discipline rules their lives here. She glances at the world outside. The foggy Friday morning promises to turn into a gloriously warm summer day. If she could just, only for a few minutes … But she must be patient. It won’t be much longer now. The attempt to assassinate Hitler two weeks ago has revived everyone’s hopes … Perhaps she can go back to school in the fall. Her father and Mr. van Pels are sure that everything will be over in October, that they will be free … It is already August. August 4, 1944.
An hour and forty-five minutes is all they have to prepare for another day. An hour and forty-five minutes passes quickly when eight people have to wash up, store their bedding, push the beds aside, and put tables and chairs back where they belong. After work begins at 8:30 in the warehouse below, they can’t make a sound. It would be easy to give themselves away. The warehouse foreman, Willem van Maaren, is suspicious enough as it is.
Before a light breakfast at nine, they occupy themselves as quietly as possible, reading or studying, sewing or knitting. And they wait. They must be especially careful during this next half hour. Anyone who absolutely has to get up tiptoes across the room like a thief, in stocking feet or soft slippers, and they have to whisper. If someone laughs or pricks a finger and says “ouch!” everyone glares. But once the office staff has arrived and the rattling typewriters, the ringing telephone, and the voices of Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, and Johannes Kleiman—all friends and helpers of the residents in the secret annex—form a backdrop of sound, the danger is diminished somewhat. Eventually Miep will come to pick up the “shopping list.” In fact, Miep will have to settle for whatever she can get them, and every day she gets a little less. But she knows how eagerly the inhabitants of the secret annex await her. Anne barrages Miep with questions, as she does every morning. And Miep, as she does every morning, puts Anne off until later. Only after Miep has sworn to return for a longer visit in the afternoon will Anne let her go back to her office. Otto Frank retires with Peter van Pels to Peter’s tiny room on the top floor. A dictation in English is the lesson plan for today. Peter is having trouble with this irritating language, so Otto spends his mornings helping him. It’s a way to pass time. On the floor below, Anne and her sister, Margot, lose themselves in their books. Patience. Patience is a virtue the mercurial Anne has had to learn these last two years.
In the warehouse, on the ground floor, the spice mill is running with its familiar monotonous clatter. Van Maaren has the door onto Prinsengracht wide open to let in the light and warmth of this soft summer day.
Ten-thirty. The foreman and his two assistants have a lot of work to do before the noon break. Suddenly several men appear in the shop—the German security service, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD. No one in the shop noticed their arrival. The men—one of them in the uniform of the “Green Police,” the others in civilian clothes—are armed. They claim to be executing a search warrant. A few words are exchanged, then van Maaren—totally astonished—points toward the stairs with his thumb. His coworker, Lammert Hartog, stands nervously to one side. The visitors hurry up the stairs to the offices on the second floor. One stays behind for a while to keep an eye on the staff.
Without knocking, one of the men, tall and thin, enters the office shared by Miep, Bep, and Mr. Kleiman. Miep doesn’t even look up at first; people often walk into the office unannounced. Only when she hears his harsh command, “Sit still and not a word out of you!” does she raise her head and find herself staring into the barrel of a pistol. “Don’t move from your seat,” the man orders, then disappears.
Gruff voices can be heard through the double folding doors. The officer and his Dutch henchmen, all of them agents of the Amsterdam city police and experienced bounty hunters, all of them members of the Nationalsozialistische Bewegung der Niederlande (NSB)—the National Socialist Movement of the Netherlands—all of them family men of advanced age, have surprised Victor Kugler at his desk in the next room; they keep their pistols trained on him.
“Who owns this building?” the uniformed man bellows at him in German. Kugler, who grew up in Hohenelbe, a small city at the foot of the Sudeten Mountains and back then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, thinks he detects a Viennese accent, and he responds in German.
“We just rent this building.”
Stiffly erect in his chair, he quickly gives the address of the Dutchman who has owned the building at 263 Prinsengracht since April 1943.
“Stop playing games with me,” the man snarls. His name is Karl Josef Silberbauer. “Who’s the boss here? That’s what I want to know.”
“I am,” Kugler says.
“Come with me.”
Kugler, a reserved and formal man who strikes many people as utterly unapproachable, has no choice. He has to take the SD men upstairs to the storerooms on the next floor. They ask if there are weapons hidden there. Kugler has to open every box, every barrel, every sack. As he does this, he tries to collect his thoughts. Have they come afterhim? Do they perhaps know that he is in touch with the resistance? That he has a fake identity card…? Or do they know about the people in the secret annex? What if some loose talk has reached the wrong ear? Everything has gone smoothly for two years and a month. Impossible that now, of all times, when the Allies have finally made a breakthrough in northern France and are on the advance, that now, with liberation only weeks away, now, when the tide has finally turned …
“You have Jews hidden in this building,” Kugler hears one of the Dutchmen say. His hopes fade. These men know. Denial will only make matters worse.
“Where are they?” the others chime in. One of them, Gezinus Gringhuis, is short and obese; another, Willem Grootendorst, has a long, yellowish face. After the war, Kleiman, Kugler, and Otto Frank would identify the third man as Maarten Kuiper, a tall, thin man who has been described as having “a...