Anne Frank by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online Page B

wrote about how “odd” it was that an ordinary girl like herself should keep a diary, and named her little book Kitty—Adolf Eichmann and Franz Rademacher, a virulently anti-Semitic official at the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Berlin, agreed that 40,000 Dutch Jews should be sent to Auschwitz. After much negotiation, the Jewish Council agreed to come up with 350 names per day, and it was decided that the deportations would begin on July 5. By the end of July, 6,000 Jews had been deported.
    Among the European countries under Nazi control, Holland lost, second only to Poland, the largest percentage of its Jews; more than three-quarters of Dutch Jews were killed. Several factors contributed to Holland’s dismal record. The Netherlands was bordered by occupied territory, making escape more difficult. The terrain lacked woodlands and underpopulated areas in which to hide. The capture of the Jews was facilitated by hyperefficient Dutch record keeping, which made it easy for the Germans to find them, and by the initial and persistent disbelief of the Dutch and the Dutch Jews.
    For every Resistance worker and brave Dutch citizen who risked imprisonment or death to hide imperiled Jews, others were unable or unwilling to help, and in fact did whatever was necessary to placate the Germans. Municipal clerks stamped J ’s on identity documents, impounded Jewish radios and Jewish bicycles, and sent the Jewish unemployed to labor camps. Dutch workers made sure that the commandeered bicycles were in perfect shape, and were equipped with spare tubes and tires provided by the Jews giving them up. According to one Dutch civil servant, “Often one made an effort to be ahead of the Germans, in order to do what one supposed the Germans would do, at least what one supposed the Germans would like.”
    Who can say, with conviction, what he or she would have done in their place? The Dutch people knew that their safety and livelihood and the survival of their families was at stake. “Everybody had a family to support: the sense of responsibility towards the family was never greater than during the years of the occupation, ” was the bitter observation of one Dutch Resistance hero, Henk von Randwijk.
    Given that there were never more than 200 German policemen in Amsterdam, the majority of the raids and arrests were performed by Dutch police, and by civilians paid a bounty for turning in Jews. From July 1942 to September 1944, 107,000 Jews were deported. According to Adolf Eichmann, the Dutch transports ran so smoothly that they “were a pleasure to behold.”
     
    O N THE other hand, there was Miep Gies. Originally Hermine Santrouschitz, an Austrian Christian who had come to Holland as a child to escape post-World War I food shortages and was subsequently adopted by her Dutch foster family, Miep had been given a Dutch name and thought of herself as Dutch.
    As a student, she was interested in philosophy and literature. Like Anne, she kept a notebook. But unlike Anne, Miep abandoned her dreams of writing, left school, and got an office job. She was unemployed when, in 1933, a neighbor who worked as a traveling sales representative for Otto Frank’s company told her about a vacancy in the Opekta office.
    Miep and Otto Frank liked each other at once. After proving that she could master the intricacies of jam and jelly making, Miep was hired as a sort of one-woman complaint bureau to help customers who called to report home-canning problems. Miep was promoted, until her job combined the duties of a secretary, an office manager, and an assistant to Otto Frank.
    Miep and her fiancé, Jan Gies, were often invited to theFranks’ Saturday afternoon open houses, where Otto Frank introduced them as his Dutch friends. The Franks’ widening social circle would grow to include Hermann van Pels, his wife, Auguste, and their son, Peter. Miep also met Fritz Pfeffer, the dentist who would appear in Anne’s diary as Dussel, and whom Miep remembered as having the