From Amsterdam Weekly, October 2004
A visit to the little street where the “other Frank family” survived the war.
Sure, I had been to No. 14. Pieter van den Zanderstraat before.
I’d first seen this little street of two storey flats in The Hague long ago, during the summer of 1965. The Western world was then in the grip of Beatlemania and I was a semi-precocious nerd of 14. Unlike some Holocaust survivors, my mother hadn’t told me very much about her experiences as an onderduiker. I was aware of the outlines of her story, but that was all.
How could she convey what she, her father, Myrtil, her mother, Flory, and her sister Sybil had experienced during their long ordeal hiding from the Nazis? Her father had prepared for the 'dive’ by planting the rumour at the grocery store that he was a German-Swiss doctor with a mad wife, a cover for nosy neighbours. The four Franks had then ‘submerged’ on 14 July 1942. In that flat they lived through three years of uncertainty, with the constant terror of being betrayed, as well as, towards the end, of being vaporised by an off-target V2 missile (many of which were launched from The Hague). Like other ‘divers who had survived, oncluding the other Frank family in Amsterdam, they had nearly starved to death during the hongerwinter of 1944-1945.
Then one day in July 1965, when we were on a commemorative tour of Europe, my mother took me to Pieter van den Zandestraat. She was returning for the first time since her departure for the US in 1947. She knocked on the wooden door of No.14 but for some reason-_fear of the unknown, maybe, and shyness- I held back. Instead, I ran across the street and took a melodramatic photo of the flat, which looked much as it must have to the four fugitives 20 years before. The curtains were closed, just as they had been when the Franks waited for the knock on the door that fortunately never came. My mother came out a short while later and we left. I put away the picture and the memory- of that visit and returned to my photography, my pimples, and my other preoccupations as a nerdy teenager growing up in America in the ‘60s. Sometimes the war did jut suddenly into sight. On one occasion during the early '70s I was watching Sidney Lumet's Cold War thriller, Fail-Safe, with my family. The film ends with a countdown and a montage of ordinary New Yorkers, unaware of their imminent demise from a bomb the US had agreed to drop in return for accidentally bombing Moscow. The countdown evidently triggered memories of the misfiring V2 missiles and mistargeted Allied bombs that had nearly incinerated my mother and her family, as they had so many of their hapless neighbours; she burst into hysterics as if that cinematic bomb was actually headed for our Queens, New York home.
But mostly my mother's war remained as opaque as the muslin curtains in the front of number of No. 14. She had handed down to me an interest in Holland and the Dutch, though, and I made an extended postgraduate trip here in 1974. In fact, I began my career as a foreign correspondent specialising in Holland and the Nordic countries. I spent two periods in The Hague in the mid and late '70s, but my personal history or for that matter, Holland's conflicted wartime history- weren’t yet my main literary interest. I even visited No. 14 once or twice, but I never could summon the courage to ring the bell. Then, in 1979, when I was 28, I decided to write something about my mother's experiences. My idea was to publish a version of my mother's story on what would have been Anne Frank's 50th birthday, to tell the story of what might have happened if the Amsterdam Franks had been as fortunate as their counterparts - my mother's family sixty miles away in The Hague. As they say, I wanted to do a mitzvah. As my mother recounted the endless days and nights of waiting and praying while the bombs and missiles fell, and the schutzpolizer searched the surrounding the streets, I realised why she had run away during the broadcast of Fail-Safe. I began to understand what she meant when she occasionally told me, when I was very young, that she felt she had been destined to get through it all. That was sort of heavy. Even more troublingly, my mother's interpretation of what had happened at No. 14 differed from those of my grandmother and aunt (my grandfather, Myrtil, had since passed on). Why had the Franks survived all of those endless days waiting in front of the curtains? Why, during the Franks' closest shave, a slave labour house-to-house search in November 1944, had the Germans inexplicably walked past No. 14? Destiny, my mother said. God, My grandmother, who was the most religious member of the family, asserted. Chance, said my aunt. Their different explanations influenced what they remembered of their experience. The absence of a diary or journal, like Anne Frank's, made it difficult to reconcile their contrasting accounts: Rashomon redux. Not surprisingly, the project went off the track. My intended mitzvah morphed into a personal crisis. A friend advised me to put the story aside for 10 or 15 years, until I had some perspective on it - and perhaps, too, until I learned more about the complicated Dutch experience of the war, and the tragedy within a tragedy that was the Dutch Holocaust. The question is often asked: why did the Dutch lose nearly 80% of their Jews? Why did so many of the Franks' fellow Jews, like Otto Frank and his sequestered family in Amsterdam, and 102,000 others, not survive? It was a difficult question to answer. It still is. In the end, the projected 10 or 15 year delay became 20 until one day in London, a few years ago. I mentioned the project in passing to a producer from BBC Radio 4, who said he would like to do something with the story. I wrote a radio series, “The Frank Family That Survived', and the radio series became a three-year book project. Evidently, I had gained the perspective and maturity I had lacked on my first mitzvah try during the intervening years. The hundreds of hours of research I conducted - including interviewing my poor mother to exhaustion- also helped to keep me on track. Even so, every time I visited Pieter van den Zandestraat to try and picture what my mother and aunt described to me, I found myself unable to ring the bell. It was as if I were afraid to find the four Franks sitting inside, benumbed, as they had been so often when they had hidden there, and especially on that one heart-stopping day in November 1944, when the Germans conducted a house-to-house search of their street for slave labour during which they came closest to being discovered. Last weekend, I decided that it was time to go inside. I went to The Hague, and to the Pieter van der Zandestraat, and rang the bell once, then several times. People started looking out at the street from behind their curtains. No one answered. I left a note saying that I'd be back that evening and left, somewhat disappointed. I'd come especially
for that reason and the anti-climax after working up my courage to ring was depressing. That evening I made my way once again through the dark, somewhat macabre streets of The Hague's centrum west, and rang the bell again. Nothing. Then, magically, a light came on. Suddenly I doubted whether the flat’s current occupant would let me in. It was late, and I hadn't exactly made an afspraak. In this country you don't knocking on people's doors late at night, unless it’s an absolute emergency. The man who opened the door turned Out to be very friendly. He told me his name was Klaas Pen and that he worked for a Dutch airline. He was happy to invite me inside. He'd heard something about his apartment being used during the war by onderduikers. He poured me a drink. I gave him my book. There were two surprises. The three-room apartment was handsomely renovated and seemed larger than it had been described. But then, the Franks had only used part of the apartment, which had been lent to them by my mother's Dutch teacher, a couragous woman by the name of Annie van der Sluis. It looked like a nice place for one man, especially with the use of the back garden (something which the Franks avoided). The other surprise was a secret compartment hidden in the back of one of the closets. Pen had discovered it when he had moved into No. 14 five years before. The space might just have been large enough for the four onderdwikers to stand in during a raid. Neither my mother nor my grandmother nor my aunt ever mentioned it. It certainly wasn't used during the slave labour raid in 1944. Perhaps my grandfather felt that there was no point. He always kept a revolver handy for such an occasion, which he never told the family about. Klaas and I sat there, nursing our drinks, reflecting on the miracle that had transpired within these same walls. Why did the Franks survive? One thing's for certain: the Franks’ neighbours on Pieter van den Zandestraat deserve some of the credit. Someone must have suspected something fishy was going on at No. 14, what with the various helpers going in and out. Still, no one told, not even during the hongerwinter, when a successful tip-off might have meant a possibly life-saving reward from the Nazis.
“This was a good street,” I said.
"Still is,” said Klaas.