Free Anne Frank by Francine Prose Page A

experienced in—the way things worked in the camp. His mother had been Miep and Jan Gies’s landlady in Amsterdam, and the couple had arranged for her and other family members to go into hiding. Stoppelman was grateful to the Franks, by association. So it could be said that Miep and Jan were still helping the Franks, even from a great distance.
    Stoppelman took a liking to the four men, especially Peter. Under his tutelage and protection, Peter managed to get a job in the camp post office. Less could be done for the older men—better candidates, according to Nazi logic, for brutal outdoor labor. Hermann van Pels was gassed in the fall of 1944 after a finger injury sapped his ability to work and his will to survive.
    Emaciated and exhausted, Otto wound up in the sick bay, where he was watched over by Peter van Pels, who took filial care of the three men with whom he had shared the annex. In October, Peter was evacuated to Mauthausen, where he died in May 1945. A similar destiny awaited Fritz Pfeffer, moved first to Sachsenhausen and then finally to Neuengamme, where he died from illness and exhaustion in December 1944. His companion, Charlotte Kaletta, continued to wait and married him posthumously in 1950.
    How one pities Auguste van Pels, so protective of her fragile dignity and her meager creature comforts, so unprepared, as if anyone could have been prepared, for what lay before her in Auschwitz, and then in Bergen-Belsen, where she was imprisoned with Anne during Anne’s final days. It was Auguste whobrought Anne, already ill, out to meet Hanneli Goslar. Auguste van Pels died in the spring of 1945, somewhere near Thieresienstadt, during one of the forced marches that followed the evacuation of the camps.
    Down to a hundred and fourteen pounds, Otto remained in the hospital barracks as liberation drew near. At one point, the patients were ordered outside by the SS and almost shot, but the threat was rescinded at the last minute.
    In January, Otto Frank was among the 7,650 prisoners whom the Russians found alive in the Auschwitz compound. It would take him six more months to return to Holland and to his daughter’s diary, which had been saved by Miep Gies, who, as I write this, in late 2008, is well into her nineties and only lately in fragile health.

The Book, Part I
    IN AMSTERDAM, ON THE SUNNY AND OTHERWISE QUIET morning of Friday, August 4, 1944, a car pulled up in front of the Opekta warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht.
    That is all one needs to write, and already the reader knows who was hiding in the attic and the fate about to befall them. We know it more than sixty years later, at a historical moment when it is often noted how little history we remember. We know the reason why we know, but it bears repeating lest we take it for granted that we know because a little girl kept a diary. Of all the roundups, the deportations, the murders committed during that time, this arrest is the one that has been investigated most closely, the one about which memories have been most thoroughly searched. It is the one we know about, if we know about any at all.
    The car arrived without sirens, without haste. Upstairs in the attic, Otto Frank was correcting Peter van Pels’s English dictation. No one in the office below was alarmed by the appearance of the car until a fat man appeared, and, speaking in Dutch, ordered everyone to be quiet.
    One of the men who got out of the car wore the uniform of a sergeant in the Jewish Affairs Section of the Gestapo in Holland. The officer was an Austrian, his subordinates Dutch civilians employed by the Nazis. They entered the spice and pectin warehouse, then went up to the office, where they found the Opekta staff. They demanded to know who was in charge. Viktor Kugler replied that he was. After searching the storerooms, the police pulled aside the bookcase that covered the door to the attic where, they had obviously been informed, Jews were hiding.
    The first to climb the narrow, nearly