The measure of Otto as a businessman and a person can be seen in his relationship with his staff. It’s hard to imagine workers who were asked to sacrifice more in support of their boss and who gave more freely than the four people employed by Otto Frank: Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl.
Otto had known Johannes Kleiman since 1923; they’d met when Otto had been attempting to set up a branch of the Michael Frank & Sons bank in Amsterdam. Kleiman had Otto’s total confidence. When Jews were forbidden to own businesses in 1941, Otto passed the running of Pectacon to Kleiman to prevent its being confiscated or liquidated by the Germans. It would eventually be renamed Gies & Co. to give it a Dutch pedigree. When Otto and his family went into hiding, Kleiman cooked the books in such a way as to hide the money he always set aside for Otto as the company’s true president.
Victor Kugler had served in World War I with the Austro-Hungarian Navy and had been wounded. He had moved to the Netherlands in 1920 and been one of Otto’s first employees, joining Opekta in 1933. Kugler shared Otto’s politics, telling Otto that he’d left Austria in 1920 because “he was disgusted with the fascism and anti-Semitism he encountered regularly in the Austrian imperial armed forces during the war.”2 He was thirty-three years old and married to a woman in serious ill health. Miep Gies described him as “a husky, good-looking man, dark haired and precise. He was always serious, never joked . . . always quite formal and polite.”3 What she didn’t know was that he’d had a complicated childhood, born to an unwed mother in a small town where being labeled illegitimate was painful, which may have accounted for his reserve.
Miep Gies, born in 1909, was also Austrian. Food shortages were so extreme in Austria after World War I that many children, including Miep, suffered from severe malnutrition. As her condition worsened, her parents enrolled her in a program through which starving children were sent to the Netherlands to recover. The children traveled alone by train, an identification card with their name hung around their necks. Miep remembered the train stopping in pitch darkness in the Dutch town of Leiden. A man took her by the hand, and they walked away from the station out of the town. Suddenly there was a house. A door opened; a woman greeted her with warm milk. Children stared. She was taken to bed and immediately fell asleep. She formed a deep bond with the Nieuwenburg family, with whom she stayed for five years. During a visit to Vienna when she was sixteen, she asked her birth parents to consent to her remaining with her adoptive Dutch family.4 Such a personal history gave her a profound compassion for refugees.
Miep was hired by Otto in 1933, when she was twenty-four. She once described Otto as a man of few words, with high principles and an ironic sense of humor.5 Her soon-to-be husband, Jan Gies, worked for the Social Services Authority and, beginning in 1943, was active in the National Support Fund (Nationaal Steun Fonds; NSF), the resistance organization in charge of providing funds to all the other branches of the resistance, with much of the money coming from the Dutch government in exile in London.6 It was dangerous work. She said, “More than twenty thousand Dutch people helped to hide Jews and others in need of hiding during those years. I willingly did what I could to help. My husband did as well. It was not enough.”7 Miep and her husband became close friends of the Franks, dining with them most weeks.
Elisabeth “Bep” Voskuijl was eighteen when she was hired by Opekta in the early summer of 1937. Ten years younger than Miep, she seemed painfully shy, but she had extraordinary courage. She spoke eloquently of her boss: Otto was “affectionate, unsparing with himself and keenly sensitive . . . a soft word always made far more impression than any shouting.”8 Her father, Johannes, joined the company as warehouse manager. A committed anti-Nazi, it was he who built the bookcase that camouflaged the entrance to the secret Annex.
Those five people would hide Otto’s family, save his life, and share his tragedies. They were not only employees but friends who had the same clear-eyed perception of the Nazi menace as he had. When he looked back at Amsterdam after the war, Otto would say that it had been an ambiguous place for him. He identified it with friendship unto death. He also identified it with betrayal.
By 1938, Otto’s sense of security began to fracture, particularly after Hitler’s annexation of Austria. Were the Netherlands really safe? If Austria could be invaded and declared part of Greater Germany, why not the Netherlands? According to Nazi ideology, the Dutch were a Germanic people who spoke a form of High German. That spring Otto traveled to the US Consulate in Rotterdam to apply for a visa to emigrate to the United States. He was not alone. By the beginning of 1939, US consulates in Europe had received a total of three hundred thousand visa applications. The annual quota of visas for German and Austrian citizens was twenty-seven thousand.9
If he thought of joining his mother and sister in Switzerland, he soon gave up the idea. Even before the war began, the Swiss had refused to accept Jewish refugees or Jewish immigrants. They did not want to offend Hitler or compromise their neutrality. The only Jews allowed into the country were people such as Palestinian Jews who could prove they were in legal transit to another country. Otto knew that if he tried to cross the border into Switzerland, he and his family would almost certainly be turned back and then would be arrested. Jews were not allowed to leave the Netherlands without visas.
Otto held on to the hope that Germany would respect Dutch neutrality as it had during the First World War. But mostly, he was putting on a brave front. He understood that he and his family were again at risk. His cousin Milly Stanfield in London recalled her correspondence with Otto in the spring of 1940. “I got a letter from him saying how terribly unhappy he was because he was sure Germany was going to attack.”10 He said he could hardly think about what would happen to the children. Milly suggested he send the girls to London; they might be safer there. Otto wrote back that he and Edith couldn’t imagine being separated from them, even though Milly was the one person he would have been able to entrust with his daughters’ lives.
Likely that was one of the decisions Otto would regret bitterly, but this is mere hindsight. Hitler had attacked Holland; why not England next? And what guaranteed that England would hold out? His children might have been alone in an occupied London, for which he could never have forgiven himself.
In March 1939, Edith’s mother, Rosa, arrived from Aachen to take up residence at 37 Merwedeplein. Then, in the summer of 1940, Edith’s brothers, Walter and Julius, were finally able to emigrate to the United States and promised to obtain visas for them all. There was again hope of a route to freedom.
7
The Onslaught