By Vera Cohen as told to Harold Berman
Southwestern Jewish Press, September 7, 1956, Pages 6, 7
{Part 3 of Adventures in San Diego Jewish History, September 7, 1956)
The story of Anne Frank and her diary, told in book form and in the current Pulitzer Prize stage adaptation, has stirred millions. Vera Cohn, a former inmate of Camp Westerbork in Holland, where Anne Frank were confined for a time, recalls her meeting with them. After liberation, Vera and her husband emigrated to the United States where Vera, in 1951, joined the national staff of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.
I sat through a performance of the Diary of Anne Frank in a daze. Only part of me was present in the theatre. The rest of my mind drifted off, lost in a blur of faces that rose out of the past.
Those faces, marked by hope and anxiety, belonged to men, women and children martyred by the Nazis. I had seen so many of them, old and young. Theirs was a world of torment. So many Anna Franks were swallowed up in it. It came near blotting me out too.
I was shaken out of my trance by a burst of applause as the final curtain came down. My husband and I left the theatre restless; we walked for some time before taking the subway home. That night I had trouble falling asleep. I lay awake many hours, just as I used to do in my concentration camp bunk. All sorts of mixed-up impressions, fragments of past memories, came back to me. The events of the summer of 1944 crowded in on me…
The armies of liberation were fighting their way deeper into Europe. I could hear the sound of their big cannon across the flatlands of eastern Holland. My husband and I, as Jews, were confined in Camp Westerbork, a Nazi concentration camp near the German border. Westerbork was used as a way station for the extermination centers eastward. The rush of Allied troops meant, for us, that the race between death and liberation had begun.
I met Anne Frank one afternoon early in August. The Frank family had just arrived from Amsterdam. They had been transported by train in sealed compartments.
Because I knew how to type, the Nazis had assigned me to the camp’s receiving center where I filled out identification card. That’s how I first met the Franks. They had been caught living underground in Amsterdam. For that, they were penalized with special confinement. They were assigned to a strafbarak (punishment b arracks). Inmates herded into these bleak quarters lived under severe restrictions. They were kept under the closest surveillance and could not move around freely like other prisoners, within the camp compound. We all wore blue overalls but the Franks, like others in a strafbarak had to wear red shoulder patches to distinguish them as prisoners who were to receive harsher treatment because they had been in hiding. To us, the red shoulder patch was a mark of esteem.
In all, they were a small group, including Mr. Frank, his wife and two daughters, another couple with a son, and a dentist — all had hid together in Amsterdam. Mr. Frank was a pleasant looking man, courteous and cultured. He stood before me tall and erect. He answered my routine questions quietly. Anne was by his side. Her face, by certain standards, was not a pretty one, but her eyes — bright, young, eager eyes–made you look at her again. She was 15 then; Margot, her sister, was two years older.
None of the Franks showed any signs of despair over their plight. Their discovery and internment was indeed tragic, touched with irony. We all knew, by the inevitable prison grapevine, that the Nazis were
losing the war. The Frank family had successfully evaded capture for two years–only to be trapped in the final months. As it turned out, had they been able to remain hidden five weeks longer, they would have escaped the fate that claimed the lives of all but Mr. Frank.
But their composure, as they grouped around my typing desk in the receiving room was one of quiet dignity. However bitter and fearful the emotions that welled within him, Mr. Frank refused to compromise his dignity as a person. His wife and daughters, as though taking a cue from him, acted precisely the same.
I thought them to be nice people, conspicuously so, a fine family group. I remember that the thought of it, at the time, filled me with disquiet. For family groups seemed to inspire the most sadistic impulses of our masters. The Nazis tried hard to exploit the fiction that family groups would be kept intact. They frequently suspended a prisoner from deportation until his family members had joined him voluntarily in Westerbork — only to deport them en masse.
Another ghoulish hoax was to allow women who were seven months pregnant to be reunited in camp with their families, a sort of snug family group. This continued until the newborn child was six weeks old. Then the entire family including the infant was dispatched to the death chamber.
My husband is a lawyer. At Westerbork he worked in an office adjoining the receiving room where new inmates were allowed to file petitions requesting a suspension of their deportation. The petitions were crucially important; a stay of deportation could mean the difference between life and death. It was granted only in special cases, to about one out of ten petitioners. My husband was one of a group of inmate lawyers who advised and assisted petitioners in drawing up the requests.
Those who held American or English passports were singularly successful in escaping deportation. Such persons were useful to the Nazis in negotiating exchanges for their own prisoners. Deportation was also suspended in the case of wounded German veterans of the first World War; but they had to prove they were wounded at least three times!
Thousand of petitions had passed through my husband’s hands in the five years we were held in Westerbork. It taught him much about people.
When the Franks were led into the office (he told me later) he knew they were to get red patches on their shoulders; he was painfully aware of the futility of their petition. But hope, no matter how slender its thread, is one of the most powerful forces in a concentration camp.
These formalities over, the Frank family was shut up in their special barracks. We never saw them again.
The following weeks were momentous. In the final days of August, the Allies had liberated one corner of Holland. The Nazis were in feverish haste to clear the Dutch camps. The race for death had picked up momentum. Camp Vught, near s’Hertogenbosch, Brabant Province, had already been cleared of most of its inmates who were deported to German camps. A last remaining group of 500 prisoners were murdered on the spot. Westerbork was to be next.
The tension in our camp was broken one Sunday morning as 2,000 inmates, including the Frank family, were loaded into a train heading east for Auschwitz. Another group left the next day for Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Shortly after, a third group left for Bergen Belsen.
The mass exodus of death was being repeated in other West European camps. Many prisoners refused to accept the knowledge of the fate awaiting them. Reports of the gas chambers came over BBC, which we listened to in secret. But the stark truth was more than one could bear; it was dismissed as British propaganda.
My husband and I were among the last to leave Westerbork, liberated by Canadian troops. Our survival was a miracle. Or so it seemed to us. The rapid advance of the Allied armies threw the Nazi executioners off balance and we cheated them out of many victims marked for the slaughterhouse. We were among the lucky ones.
After the war, those of us who survived had an insatiable thirst for news. I got my first report of the Franks shortly after the Nazi surrender. The girls, I learned, had been transported from Auschwitz to Bergen Belsen, where Margot died of starvation. Anne, her will to live gone, succumbed shortly after. Only a few weeks later, Bergen Belsen was liberated.
Mrs. Frank died in Auschwitz. Mr. Frank, the only who survived, got back to Holland. He later settled in Switzerland.
When Anne’s diary was found and turned over to him, at first he refused to read it. He nursed the hope that she was still alive; he was reluctant to invade her privacy. He consented to read it only when he was convinced that Anne was dead…
There are moments when this whole nightmare becomes too oppressive. At such times, Anne’s diary has a strangely curative quality. Such is the miracle of this 15-year-old healer whom I will always remember as the slim little girl with the expressive eyes and the persistent dignity of our people.
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Adventures in San Diego Jewish History” is sponsored by Inland Industries Group LP in memory of long-time San Diego Jewish community leader Marie (Mrs. Gabriel) Berg. Our “Adventures in San Diego Jewish History” series will be a regular feature until we run out of history. To find stories on specific individuals or organizations, type their names in our search box, located just above the masthead on the right hand side of the screen.