The Last Secret of the Secret Annex: The Untold Story of Anne Frank, Her Silent Protector, and a Family Betrayal

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. (May)