Interview Mirjam de Gorter
The granddaughter of the Jewish notary feels 'fooled' by the cold case team
For the first time, the granddaughter of the betrayer of Anne Frank identified by the cold case team tells her story. Mirjam de Gorter (62) feels "cheated."
Rianne Oosterom -18 March 2022, 19:27
Mirjam de Gorter and Ilias Frieling, lovers and violin enthusiasts from Haarlem, are just sitting down to a plate of sauerkraut with chicken on Friday evening, January 14, when the phone rings. That the content of this phone call will dominate their lives for the next two months, they cannot imagine at the time.
On the line is Vince Pankoke, a former FBI agent and one of the driving forces behind an international cold case team that has been investigating the betrayal of Anne Frank for years. De Gorter, a professional violin player and teacher in everyday life, spoke with him twice after she was asked to participate by Thijs Bayens, documentary maker and initiator of the project.
Pankoke drops a bombshell. "Your grandfather is the guilty party in the book."
De Gorter: "That's more or less how he put it - 85 percent sure," she says with a smile, referring to the "probability percentage" that the cold case team attached to their conclusion that Arnold van den Bergh must have been the traitor to The Secret Annex.
The team's now heavily criticized theory, which it expounded in
The Betrayal of Anne Frank that was to be published the Monday after the phone call, is that Arnold van den Bergh had access to addresses of people in hiding through the Jewish Council, which he traded for the freedom of himself and his family when the situation became dire.
'Anyone would have done so,' Pankoke says on the phone that Friday night, De Gorter explains. She doesn't know what to say back. "We were completely in shock, Ilias and I."
Anonymous message
As the most important piece of evidence, Pankoke mentions the anonymous slip of paper that Otto Frank, Anne's father, supposedly received in the mail after the war, stating that Van den Bergh was the traitor. The team obtained a copy of this and found that this message had been copied with Otto Frank's typewriter.
Until that time, Mirjam de Gorter did not have the idea that her grandfather, whom she herself never knew, would be designated as a suspect, also because she had presented quite a few counterarguments to that effect in her contact with the investigators, she says.
"The cold case team always appeased me that there were several scenarios. They didn't hint at anything like: it could be worse than you think, absolutely nothing."
Portrait of the Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh. He was accused by the cold case team of betraying Anne Frank.
That she is telling her story now for once has to do with a scientific report by a number of renowned historians that will be published next Tuesday, in which even more holes will be shot in the book.
After the publication of
The Betrayal of Anne Frank, that book completely dominated her and Ilias' lives. Due to the report that is about to be published, it feels as if there is now 'a sort of safety net' that makes her want to tell her side of the story as well, because a meaningful discussion based on arguments is now possible.
She feels 'really cheated' by the cold case team. She had a lot of faith in Thijs Bayens and Vince Pankoke, with whom she was on friendly terms. She was also reassured by the fact that the team opposite her presented her with 'a selection of renowned researchers'.
Media campaign
Immediately after Pankoke, Thijs Bayens also calls. An international media campaign is going to start after the weekend and there is a press release, whether she wants to take a look at it? She is still dumbfounded. She also has absolutely no idea what's in the book. She says she won't get the PDF until Saturday, when all the journalists have long had it.
That afternoon she crawls behind her laptop and Ilias behind the computer upstairs. She doesn't like what she reads about herself. But there's nothing she can do about it, she knows. This book has already been printed. The cold case team advises her against going public herself, she says. "I didn't want emotion-TV either."
At seven o'clock in the morning on Monday, the news reports pour in. Immediately De Gorter receives phone calls from shocked family members. Some she knows, others not at all yet. "It really felt like a war machine was coming over us, because the whole world was repeating my grandfather's name."
Time to read through the book Miriam and Ilias have barely had at this point. They are not at all prepared for the media offensive, they tell us. "The final blow was the broadcast on the American CBS, where the emphasis was on the Jewish notary who had committed treason - I found it downright anti-Semitic," says De Gorter.
What hurts even more is that Thijs Bayens promised her at the beginning to be 'prudent' with the information about her family that she would provide to the cold case team, she says. But large on CBS's 60 Minutes broadcast, she sees her grandfather's wedding photo again, which she showed to the team. A complete surprise to her, to which she did not give explicit permission.
No swearing
In the week following the book's publication, Thijs Bayens calls her to ask how things are going. "I'm not going to curse then either," says De Gorter. "I'm not like that. But I did say that in the first or second night after the book was launched I dreamed I was floating in space, and crashed."
How did it all come to this? At the dining table in the kitchen, surrounded by her grandfather Arnold van den Bergh's books, thick volumes on etchings and impressionist art - he was an artistic man, she knows from her mother's stories - Miriam de Gorter goes back to 2018, when Thijs Bayens first contacted her.
An email lands in her inbox, a very civilized email, in which Bayens tells about the cold case investigation with a link to the website attached. But, he writes, the investigation "is honestly about much more than the Frank family," including resistance networks and hiding places for Jewish families.
Bayens writes in the email which
Trouw accessed that he would like to speak to De Gorter "in light of this search and analysis of resistance and hiding networks. He explicitly mentions that at that time he is researching Jewish people in hiding in the Gooi region and De Gorter knows from the stories that her family was in hiding in Laren. So, after hesitation, she agrees.
Unsuspectingly, actually. De Gorter tells us that Bayens did not mention her grandfather as a potential suspect during that first conversation, but in the chapter 'The Granddaughter' in the book she reads later that Bayens nervously rang her doorbell that first time, because he had just read all kinds of information about the anonymous slip of paper.
She concludes that he deliberately did not bring it up. That is why she is very frank about her family. That makes her feel, to say the least, 'pretty cheated'. In fact, she says, it was just 'false pretenses' under which she was encouraged to have a conversation.
That Arnold van den Bergh is a suspect in the cold case investigation, Mirjam de Gorter learns in 2019 in a staged 'confrontation' in the team's recording studio. Initially, the team wants to make a film, only to turn it into a book later. De Gorter has to redo the encounter with Vince Pankoke on camera as many as ten times.
"I thought it was a nice joke.
'Hi, nice to meet you' is what it sounded like repeatedly. With one of those stupid smoke devices in the background. How funny, I thought. I totally didn't realize the impact of what was about to happen," she says. Because suddenly the anonymous message to Otto Frank is shoved under her nose, with her grandfather's name as traitor.
In shock
"It was dead quiet in that recording studio," she says. "I could hear everyone breathing. I don't even remember how I reacted, I was in shock. I couldn't say: no, that's not my grandfather, you know. I couldn't start screaming either. So I just asked: 'how did you get this, what does this mean?' They didn't want to give any information or say anything else about it."
She was reassured though, she says. "'We still have a lot of other lines,' they said."
Once home, Miriam and Ilias dive into history. They search for what literature can be found about Arnold van den Bergh. They stumble upon a 1960s police investigation into the note, which concluded that Arnold van den Bergh could not have done it because he was a man of integrity.
De Gorter also knows from her mother that her grandfather went into hiding in Laren after the war, having received a tip that he would be arrested. Surely, she and Ilias thought, this also made it extremely unlikely that he had traded hiding addresses for his own and his family's safety?
They throw that and other facts at Vince Pankoke in a follow-up interview they requested themselves, because they had become a bit worried after all. "He just waved it away," says De Gorter. "We had no proof. Neither did he, but he did assume his own truth. He appeased me again: there are still many scenarios."
Until she is confronted with a
fait accompli on that Friday evening. The Saturday before publication she discovered that there were mistakes in the book. It says, for example, that she was reluctant to cooperate 'because her grandfather was a member of the much maligned Jewish Council.' "That's not how I saw it or thought it," she says.
More things have been twisted "like a picture hanging askew," she says, but the strangest thing she finds is a passage about her grandmother, Arnold van den Bergh's wife, who allegedly said that until long after the notary's death she had received "personal anonymous invective phone calls about the Jewish Council."
"Well, I don't know anything about that, that's not from me," says De Gorter. In retrospect, she finds it "careless and unethical" that she was not allowed to read the text beforehand, even though she had asked for it, as well as for the TV recordings.
A real chess player
Miriam and Iliad are emphatically not only concerned with what happened to them after the book was published. "It goes much further," says De Gorter. "My grandfather is portrayed in the book as a rich, cunning man, a real chess player. That's just the confirmation of the time-honored stigma on the Jew, which is so terribly damaging."
Her friend Ilias Frieling adds, anticipating the report to be released on Tuesday, "A book has been put out into the world with the use of Anne Frank's name that misrepresents and does serious damage. There is much more going on here than just a lie regarding a person who is no longer alive."
De Gorter: "That is why we want the book to be taken out of circulation worldwide as soon as possible. So what does this disreputable historical research contribute to? I hope that the report next week is a signal to Harper Collins (international publisher, ed.). So that this does not pass with impunity, uncritically."
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Reaction of the cold case team
The chairman of the cold case team, Pieter van Twisk, says that it is true that Mirjam de Gorter only heard on Friday that her grandfather was designated as the main suspect and that she was only allowed to inspect the book on Saturday. The reason for this, he says, was that members of the cold case team 'were also bound by secrecy'.
Van Twisk disputes that the team advised De Gorter not to appear in the media. She would have indicated that herself. About the passage about the phone calls about the Jewish Council, he says that she did tell this in a conversation with Thijs Bayens on March 15, 2018. Because Bayens referred in his first email to the site of the cold case team, he also does not believe that De Gorter was approached under false pretenses to participate in the investigation.
That De Gorter felt overwhelmed by the fact that her grandfather was the main suspect, the team regrets. "We have always felt a great involvement with the position of Mirjam de Gorter, who has made a big impression on us, precisely because of her steadfastness in wanting to cooperate in this investigation. That she now feels this way is really very unfortunate."
Van Twist: 'Although we thought that the results would cause a commotion, we did not foresee how intense and toxic they would be in the Netherlands.' The current tendency to doubt the research must be very confusing for Mirjam de Gorter, says Van Twisk.
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