The long-awaited book. Now available in the English language (out Tuesday, Jen 18). Rosemary Sullivan spent six years following an international research team – historians, analysts, and criminologists who analyzed the archives and did a job similar to the work of a police investigative department as if it were a crime. The team was headed by Vincent Pankoke, a retired FBI agent.
Vincent Pankoke and his team studied thoroughly thousands of pages of records and interviewed many descendants of people who knew the Franks. They reconstructed the day-by-day events leading up to the arrest using FBI methods. According to them, the riddle was solved and the result did not please the Jewish community. It surprised the investigators themselves. All the uproar was raised only because Pankoke announced that “very probably the betrayer is the Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh”.
The researchers determined that van den Bergh, who died in 1950, had access to information about the hiding place, belonged to the Amsterdam Jewish Council. He may have wanted to save his own family in this way.
Anne Frank on her 13th birthday started writing a diary. It has been read by more than thirty million people around the world. She wrote it while she and her family and four others were hiding in Amsterdam. The Germans discovered them after nearly two years of hiding – on August 4, 1944.
They were all transported to German concentration camps. Anne died a year later in Bergen Belsen, just before the camp was liberated. She was 15 years old. The teen’s notes were hidden by Miep Gies, who helped those in hiding. After the war, she gave them to the girl’s father Otto, the only survivor of the family. The journal was published in 1947. It has been translated into more than 60 languages.
credits to chapters.indigo.ca // pinterest
In The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation, Rosemary Sullivan profiles the investigators, explains the motives of those in hiding, their pursuers, and profiles the suspects. She completes the whole with images of Amsterdam during the war.