Free Anne Frank by Francine Prose Page B

vertical stairs, Kugler told Edith Frank, “The Gestapo is here.” She stood still and said nothing.
    The Gestapo officer and his men entered the secret annex and found the Jews, as they had expected, though they would not have known—as we do now—whom they would find. Three men, two women, a young man, a young woman, a girl.
    In a few more years, no one alive will have witnessed the scene of a Nazi arresting a Jew. There have been, and will be, other arrests and executions for the crime of having been born into a particular race or religion or tribe. But the scene of Nazis hunting down Jews is unlikely to happen again, though history teaches us never to say never. This will be the arrest that future generations can visualize, like a scene in a book. They will have to remind themselves that it happened to real people, though these people have survived, and will live on, as characters in a book.
    In fact this scene is not in the book, but that book’s existence is the reason we know about the arrest. We know that the Austrian officer’s name was Karl Josef Silberbauer. And we know thathe was disturbed by the detail of Otto Frank’s military trunk, labeled as the property of Lieutenant Otto Frank, which meant he would have been Sergeant Silberbauer’s superior when both fought in the German army during World War I.
    Later, Otto Frank would recall that Silberbauer seemed to snap to attention. For the Austrian, the Jew’s former military rank created a troubling disruption in the simultaneously adrenalinized and business-as-usual theater of arrest.
    In a photo from that period, the thirty-three-year-old Silberbauer looks younger than his age. Posed stiffly, with slicked-back hair and a lumpy jaw, as if he has tobacco wadded in both cheeks, he wears a tie and a jacket with a tiny swastika pinned to one lapel. Miep Gies described him as looking neither cruel nor angry, but “as though he might come around tomorrow to read your gas meter or punch your streetcar ticket.”
    Silberbauer couldn’t help asking Otto Frank how long all those people could have lived like that, crowded together in an attic behind a bookcase. He was taken aback by the answer: two years and one month. As proof, Otto Frank pointed to the doorway marked with pencil to record his daughters’ growth. Look, he said, his younger daughter had already grown beyond the last mark.
    A heartbreaking gesture, maybe less odd than instinctive, since his daughters, Margot and Annelies, were the center of Otto Frank’s life. Those marks, which can still be seen on the wall of the Anne Frank Museum, were what he had to show for the two years in hiding. Possibly, Otto Frank imagined that the pencil lines would kindle, in the Nazi officer, a flicker of humanity.
    As we know, they did not.
    After the war, Silberbauer returned to Austria, where he was jailed for fourteen months on charges of having roughedup some Communists in 1938. Later he was rehired as a junior inspector on the Vienna police force. In 1963, Simon Wiesenthal tracked him down with the aid of a 1943 telephone directory that listed the names and numbers of all the Gestapo officials who had served in occupied Holland.
    Guided by a hunch that Silberbauer might again be working for the Viennese police, Wiesenthal found his quarry when the official newspaper of the Austrian Communist Party reported that Silberbauer was alive and well and, indeed, a cop in Vienna. The Austrian officials launched an investigation to determine the criminality of Silberbauer’s wartime activities. Otto Frank’s statement—that Silberbauer had “done his duty and acted correctly,” that he had been businesslike and even cordial—virtually ended the inquest, which was dropped for lack of evidence, though one might question the ruling that sending eight Jews to a concentration camp, seven of them to their deaths, would be criminal only if performed in an unprofessional manner.
    Silberbauer remembered telling Otto Frank