She was suddenly another person there writing at the table… It was as if I had interrupted an intimate moment in a very, very private friendship.’ (Anne Frank Remembered, 1982).
Who betrayed the eight people in hiding is not known. At mid-morning on 4 August 1944 an SS officer drove along Prinsengracht and stopped outside the Opekta building. With him were members of the Dutch Security Police. A gun was pointed at Miep and she was told to stay where she was. After a search the entrance to the Annexe was found. Otto Frank and his family, the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer were arrested and later transferred to Westerbork transit camp in north Holland. On 3 September 1944 they were part of the last transport to leave Westerbork for Auschwitz.
Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman were also arrested. They were first taken to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation and then on to Amersfoort transit camp. Johannes Kleiman was so ill by that time that he was released after intervention by the Red Cross. Victor Kugler was moved to a labour camp in Zwolle and then to another in Wageningen. In March 1945, while he was being marched to Germany with other forced labourers, the allies attacked from the air and in the confusion he escaped into a field and was hidden by a farmer. He made his way back home but after a difficult time with work, he and his wife eventually settled in Canada.
Following the SS raid on the Annexe, Miep and Bep found Anne’s diaries and papers strewn across the floor. Miep gathered everything together and tucked it away in her office desk. Two months after his return from Auschwitz, Otto Frank received a letter confirming that Margot and Anne were dead. Miep was with him and could find no words of comfort. It was then that she remembered the diaries and Anne Frank’s stories, and she handed them to Otto Frank.
MOTHER, FATHER, MARGOT and I were sitting quite pleasantly together when Peter suddenly came in and whispered in Father’s ear. I caught the words ‘a barrel falling over in the warehouse’ and ‘someone fiddling with the door’.
Margot heard it too, but was trying to calm me down, since I’d turned white as chalk and was extremely nervous. The three of us waited. In the meantime Father and Peter went downstairs, and a minute or two later Mrs van Daan came up from where she’d been listening to the radio. She told us that Pim* had asked her to switch it off and tiptoe upstairs. But you know what happens when you’re trying to be quiet – the old stairs creaked twice as loud. Five minutes later Peter and Pim, the colour drained from their faces, appeared again to relate their experiences.
They had positioned themselves under the staircase and waited. Nothing happened. Then all of a sudden they heard a couple of bangs, as if two doors had been slammed shut inside the house. Pim bounded up the stairs, while Peter went to warn Dussel, who finally presented himself upstairs, though not without kicking up a fuss and making a lot of noise. Then we all tiptoed in our stockinged feet to the van Daan family on the next floor.
Mr van D. had a bad cold and had already gone to bed, so we gathered around his bedside and discussed our suspicions in a whisper.
Every time Mr van D. coughed loudly, Mrs van D. and I nearly had a nervous fit. He kept coughing until someone came up with the bright idea of giving him codeine.
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