Faced with an existential threat, what would you do?

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Cold cases stick in the craw of our social conscience, and for good reason. When it comes to something as sweeping, systematic and chilling as the Holocaust, though, responsibility and horror are both so diffuse that the thought of resolution on an individual level does little to tip the balance. Still, when I saw that “60 Minutes” was running a program (https://cbsn.ws/3L1FPxh) about a revived investigation into who betrayed Anne Frank and her family, I was intrigued.

As a teenager, I read and reread Anne’s diary. I named my own journal, which I wrote in for years, and ended my high school theater career with the role of Margot Frank in a dramatic adaptation of the diary.

Looking back, I can identify a deep discomfort with the lack of resolution in the Franks’ story as the driving factor behind my commitment to the role, and to the narrative. The entire experience of the play, and the significance of its source material, was compounded by the dread of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Though we know, of course, the tragic fate that awaits Anne and her family, the question that has plagued us since the aftermath of the war continues to ring in our ears – why, why, why? And, with the Franks specifically, who?

While the diary affords us a complex and intimate sense of Anne’s thoughts and emotions, the questions it provokes – the ones FBI investigator Vince Pankoke attempts to answer – provide a harrowing, if humanizing, portrait of survival at the height of Nazi terror.

After almost six years of painstaking investigative work – aided, sickeningly, by the Nazis’ meticulous documentation of their victims – Pankoke and his team named a suspect during the “60 Minutes” special: Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish businessman who lived in Amsterdam with his family at the same time as the Franks.

To many, Pankoke and his colleagues acknowledged, this would come as a surprise: Was the culprit really another Jew?

Bram van de Meer, a Dutch former investigative psychologist, spoke with “60 Minutes” correspondent Jon Wertheim about the importance of context with a theory like this:

“You would expect maybe that a very bad person did this, a person with – I would say a psychopathic mind would do this .... But you have to be so very careful. It’s war .... You’re thinking everyday about your own survival.”

Ultimately, van der Meer says, “you end up in a situation where it could be anybody.”

Van den Bergh served on a Jewish Council, a group organized by the Nazis in a manipulative effort to force Jews to choose between their own lives and those of other Jews. As the stakes increased and “Final Solution” efforts became more vehement, the council in Amsterdam was dissolved.

Van den Bergh and his family, notably, were one of the few not sent to concentration camps. In fact, Pankoke and his colleagues uncovered evidence that van den Bergh continued living in Amsterdam without persecution, a feat “only possible if van den Bergh had some kind of leverage,” Pankoke said. 

“I’d call him a chess player,” said Pankoke. “He thought in terms of layers of protection, by obtaining different exemptions from being placed into the camps.”

Pankoke suggests that the Frank family was one of many on a list of names that a member of the Jewish Council, perhaps van den Bergh, turned over to the Nazis in order to spare their own family from the same fate. The existence of such lists is verified in the national archive, and such a practice was a recurring, difficult choice for Jews put in a position of choosing between their family and another’s.

Knowing what we know about Anne, and what a cultural treasure her diary has become, it can feel outrageous and impossible that another Jew, in the same, terrifying circumstances, would turn on a child who famously wrote: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

However, it is vital to the continued healing of the Jewish people that we acknowledge the varied means of survival during the Holocaust. We must have those difficult conversations that remind us that the horrors of persecution and murder during the Holocaust were as insidious as they were lethal.

It is important to note that the research in the 60 Minutes special and the corresponding book has been met with considerable skepticism and is certainly not definitive. Yet acknowledging the kinds of decisions people of all religions and identities faced during this time is still important. What’s more, conjecture about betrayal within the Jewish community during this time prompts vital reflection, even if the facts of this particular case remain questionable.

I found Rabbi Menachem Sebbag’s analysis of this potentially devastating revelation most touching, if difficult to swallow.

“I hope that people will understand that one of the things that the Nazi ideology did during the Holocaust was to dehumanize Jewish people,” said Sebbag, who advised investigators and documentarians during the project. “And going back into history, and looking for the truth, and attaining truth, is actually giving the Jewish people back their own humanity.

“Even if that means that sometimes Jewish people are seen as not acting morally correct, that gives them back their own humanity, because that’s the way human beings are when they’re faced with existential threats.”

In her final diary entry before being captured, 15-year-old Anne wrote, almost prophetically, of human behavior as inherently relational – there is no vacuum in which to make our choices:

“I just can’t keep it up anymore ... I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if … if only there were no other people in the world.”

From our modern vantage point, absent such terrible circumstances, we can pass judgment on whoever it was that betrayed the Frank family. However, be it a Jew or not who did the deed, the investigation prompts a humbling and crucial reckoning with the complex nature of humanity, and how we reach decisions in times of conflict and strife.

The special report proposes an answer to the identity of the Franks’ betrayer, but more importantly, it gestures at the interiority of the millions of people whose voices weren’t preserved. And maybe most importantly, it asks: What would you have done?

EMMA NEWBERY (enewbery@jewishallianceri.org) produces podcasts for the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island. She also writes for Jewish Rhode Island and the Jewish Alliance of Greater Island.

Anne Frank, Holocaust