During the day, they had to remain absolutely quiet because transactions and routine tasks were being conducted downstairs at Opetka, a firm that produced pectin, a thickener used in making jams and jellies, and also traded in spices. So no turning on the tap for water, and no flushing the toilet. Talking in whispers or better yet, no talking at all.
Walking around in socks or bare feet, or sitting as still as possible. No opening the curtains or windows, even in summer. And above all else, no going outside β so no possibility of partaking of such simple pleasures as feeling the sun on your face, or the wind blowing in your hair β ever. These eight people understood that no one must know they were in hiding, because if the secret got out, they would be arrested and deported, likely to die in a concentration camp.
Over the decades, speculation has circled around possible candidates who might have betrayed the eight. Individuals ranged from an Opetka warehouse worker to most recently, a Jewish accountant. The latter generated a lot of buzz last year because a former FBI agent took part in the investigation, but the theory has mostly been discounted and criticized with scholarly aplomb.
This potential breakthrough was not leveled by an attention-seeking author or misguided sensationalist, but by Joop Van Wijk-Voskuijl, the son of one of the helpers himself. And if this possibility makes your stomach seize, think of the impact on the man whose name gets top billing on the book cover. An earlier version of the book was published in in the Netherlands. Its unlikely genesis sprang from a letter sent by a thenyear-old Belgian Jeroen de Bruyn, who even at his young age had an all-consuming interest in Anne Frank, and a desire to find out more about Bep Voskuijl, the least-documented of all the helpers.
Despite the emotional turmoil, evidence is presented without fear or favor via documents, excerpts and interviews. Realizing the need for a hiding place, Otto Frank had been for months moving furniture and supplies into the rooms of the annex, attached to a four-story brick canal house at Prinsengracht , location now of the world-famous Anne Frank House. After the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in May , numerous and increasingly restrictive measures were imposed on the Jewish population of about ,, from the petty to the life-threatening, regulating everything from what time of day they could shop to barring them from public pools to taking away their livelihoods to having to wear a yellow Jewish star on their clothing.
