The Last Secret of the Secret Annex
The Untold Story of Anne Frank, Her Silent Protector, and a Family Betrayal
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
A riveting historical investigation and family memoir that intertwines the iconic narrative of Anne Frank with the untold story of Bep Voskuijl, her protector and closest confidante in the Annex, bringing us closer to understanding one of the great secrets of World War II.
Anne Frank’s life has been studied by many scholars, but the story of Bep Voskuijl has remained untold, until now. As the youngest of the five Dutch people who hid the Frank family, Bep was Anne’s closest confidante during the 761 excruciating days she spent hidden in the Secret Annex. Bep, who was just twenty-three when the Franks went into hiding, risked her life to protect them, plunging into Amsterdam’s black market to source food and medicine for people who officially didn’t exist under the noses of German soldiers and Dutch spies. In those cramped quarters, Bep and Anne’s friendship bloomed through deep conversations, shared meals, and a youthful understanding.
Told by her own son, The Last Secret of the Secret Annex intertwines the story of Bep and her sister Nelly with Anne’s iconic narrative. Nelly’s name may have been scrubbed from Anne’s published diary, but Joop van Wijk-Voskuijl and Jeroen De Bruyn expose details about her collaboration with the Nazis, a deeply held family secret. After the war, Bep tried to bury her memories just as the Secret Annex was becoming world famous as a symbol of resistance to the Nazi horrors. She never got over losing Anne nor could Bep put to rest the horrifying suspicion that those in the Annex had been betrayed by her own flesh and blood.
This is a story about those caught in between the Jewish victims and Nazi persecutors, and the moral ambiguities and hard choices faced by ordinary families like the Voskuijls, in which collaborators and resisters often lived under the same roof.
Beautifully written and unsettlingly suspenseful, The Last Secret of the Secret Annex will show us the Secret Annex as we’ve never seen it before. And it provides a powerful understanding of how historical trauma is inherited from one generation to the next and how sometimes keeping a secret hurts far more than revealing a shameful truth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist De Bruyn and retired marketing manager Wijk-Voskuijl deliver a poignant portrait of the latter's mother, Elizabeth "Bep" Voskuijl, an employee of Otto Frank's who helped hide the Frank family in Amsterdam. Seeking to help solve the mystery of who betrayed the Franks to the Gestapo, Wijk-Voskuijl recounts his mother's struggles during his childhood, including an attempted suicide. "If my mother just started thinking about the Secret Annex," he writes, "she would get migraines, slip into a depression and spend much of the next day in bed." Wijk-Voskuijl also notes that unlike Miep Gies, Bep's colleague and fellow member of the Opetka Circle that hid the Franks, his mother avoided all recognition for her efforts in retrieving Anne's diary from the annex. Though the authors uncover evidence that Bep's sister, Nelly, collaborated with the Nazis, and describe numerous instances in which Bep sought to hide or destroy material from that period in her life (most tantalizingly, she instructed another of her sons to burn dozens of letters after her death; he did so, before reading them), the theory that Bep's depression was caused by guilt over betraying the Franks isn't definitively proven. Still, this is an anguished investigation into one of the Holocaust's enduring mysteries.
