The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation by Rosemary Sullivan

    

        The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation by Rosemary Sullivan follows a team of historians and researchers as they try to uncover the mystery of who betrayed Otto Frank, Edith Frank, Anne Frank, Margot Frank, Hermann van Pels, Auguste van Pels, Peter van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer to the Nazis. Overall, I really enjoyed Rosemary Sullivan’s narration of not only how the researchers came to their conclusion, but also how she provided historical context for the Holocaust. It sounds like the researchers genuinely put a lot of time and effort into their conclusion, but unfortunately I, and many others, think they relied too heavily on circumstantial evidence.

        This book has actually been discredited by historians and the Dutch publishing company recalled the book after finding many errors in their research. One of the many complaints of this book is that there were no Holocaust studies historians on their team which is a huge oversight on their part. This could have given more insight into what the Nazi ruled Netherlands were like and allowed them to understand more about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust.

My personal issue is that the researchers, and Sullivan as the author, often flip back and forth between whether they’re positive they know who it is or if it’s just their educated guess. Based on the research that is presented to us, I don't think they can definitively say that it was Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish notary, for a multitude of reasons. They’re conclusion is primarily based off of an anonymous note supposedly given to Otto Frank at the end of the war claiming Van den Bergh as the betrayer, yet there is no other evidence supporting that. Also, it is believed that the Van den Bergh family was in hiding when the Nazis raided the annex on August 4th, 1944.

While the book was well written, it’s just another case of how you often have to do more research and not believe the easy answer. I think the book would have been better without including their conclusion and just talked about their research and the Holocaust. It’s an incredibly harmful thing to claim that a Jewish man trying to survive the war with his family was to blame for what happened in the annex and should only be shared with absolute certainty which, in my opinion, they do not have.

    Overall, I’d give this novel a 2/5 solely for the writing style.

Quotes

• Page 8
• How strange that the bully, unmasked, is always awash in self-pity.
• Page 9
• But Anne Frank will not survive.
• And that is what makes her diary so harrowing. From the beginning, we know the ending, but Anne Frank does not.
• Page 75
• “When, all those years, you've looked after these people and they're suddenly torn away, what is there left to say?”
• Page 77
• It was the universe gone mad: the hair of the people whose existence the Nazis were annihilating was used in the manufacture of weapons of war.