Chapter 5 Shadowland — The Life and Media of Gordon F. Sander

CHAPTER 5

Shadowland

Although 5,000 Wehrmacht and Dutch soldiers are dead, there is no animosity in our hearts... We will not persecute, nor will we force our convictions upon the population...

Arthur Seyss-Inquart, German Reichskommissar for the Netherlands, June 1940

Many Dutchmen have been persuaded that Germany is bound to dominate Europe and that the best policy for Dutchmen is to cooperate with Germany...

From an article about occupied Holland in the Saturday Evening Post, February 1941

They spent many beautiful hours...

The inscription below a panel from the sketchbook of Edgar Reich, an artist interned at Kamp Westerbork, a Dutch-based German work camp, in which he depicts his romance, during the winter of 1942, with his fiancée, Dorrit Frank; the panel shows them dancing

The war in Holland was over as soon as it had started. The British military experts quoted two months before in The New Yorker were very nearly right. The Dutch were able to hold off the Germans for five days.

Not five minutes, but close enough.

Not that they didn't fight. They did. The Dutch air force, including the squadron of "bombing planes' that Prime Minister Colijn had thoughtfully purchased several years before, fought spectacularly. Doomed from the moment they took off, every available pilot from the ready pool flew into combat. Every Dutch pilot was downed, though not before an equal number of German planes were also shot down.

The Dutch army, under its commander General Henri Winkelman, gave a sufficiently good account of itself, capturing or dispersing the German forces that had landed near The Hague, as well as holding Rotterdam, as to move Hitler, who was following the unequal battle from his western command post and wished to use some of the troops bogged down in Holland to exploit a new opportunity that had just opened up in France, into issuing one of his rare special directives.

"The power of resistance of the Dutch army has proved to be stronger than anticipated,' stated Hitler's Directive No. 11, issued on the morning of 14 May, the fifth day of invasion. 'Political as well as military considerations require that this resistance be broken speedily?

And so it was. Later that same morning, while Winkelman (whose men, despite having lost 3,000 of their number, still had a good bit of fight in them was considering German terms, a covey of Luftmaffe bombers appeared over the centre of Rotterdam, Holland's second largest city and busiest port, and without warning dropped their high-explosive loads. Instantly a square-mile area was levelled. Over 800 civilians were killed, several thousand more were wounded, 78,000 were made home-less. Rotterdam, like Guernica before it, became a byword for aerial terror.

And it remained so for several years, together with Coventry, the English Midlands city which the Luftmaffe also bombed to smithereens later that year during the Battle of Britain - until the far more devastating strategic bombing raids, often comprising as many as 1,000 bombers or more, which the RAF and the US Eighth Air Force directed at Germany later in the war.

But in May 1940, all that was far in the future. One Rotterdam was sufficient to take the wind out of the Dutch. That afternoon, Winkelman surrendered. Within hours German tanks had moved into Amsterdam and The Hague, taking control of central points, as the benumbed local populace looked on. For the first time since the Spanish Wars of Independence, metropolitan Holland was under foreign occupation.

Although every Jew living in Holland that week was terrified by this turn of events, none were more distraught than the estimated 20,000 German and Austrian-Jewish refugees who suddenly found themselves under German rule again. No doubt Myrtil was not the only German Jew who tried - and failed - to hire a boat out of Scheveningen that day.

Escape by land was equally pointless: the closest neutral country - Switzerland - lay across three well-guarded frontiers. Nowhere,' as Gerald Ratlinger writes in The Final Solution, 'was the Jewish population more trapped than in Holland?

For some, suicide represented the only way out. During the first week of the German occupation, an estimated 250 German Jews took their lives rather than have to face their Nazi tormentors again. The Franks knew one Scheveningen couple who died by their own hand. "They just walked into the dunes,' Flory remembered, 'and they never came back.'

However, the whirlwind that most Jews, especially German ones, feared in the wake of the German blitzkrieg did not come to pass, and the shock of those first traumatic post-invasion days gradually subsided.

In June 1940, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the newly appointed Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, gave his inaugural speech at the Binnenhof, site of the soon-to-be-disbanded Dutch legislature in The Hague. Seyss-Inquart's name was already familiar to most Dutchmen from the 1938 Anschluss, and his subsequent position as deputy to Hans Frank, the fanatical governor of occupied Poland.

Understandably they were apprehensive about what to expect from their newly imposed regent. At least they did not need to feel slighted by the appointment: Hitler had clearly sent one of his top men to Holland to run things there. At the same time, by dint of Seyss-Inquart's appointment and the installation of a civilian administration in the Netherlands, it was also apparent that Hitler's plans for the Dutch were different from those for most of the other newly acquired territories of the Reich including Belgium and France, which had military governments imposed on them. Amongst the occupied territories of western Europe, only Norway, where Seyss-Inquart's civilian counterpart, Josef Terboven, had just been installed, were given this dubious privilege.

What did this mean? What, in fact, were the Reich's plans for Holland?

The music-loving Nazi proconsul did his best to allay Dutch suspicions in his placatory speech, which was accompanied by violins. We will not persecute nor will we force our convictions upon the population,' he declared. Most heartening to those who wished to believe him - and at that point many if not most Dutchmen did - Seyss-Inquart vowed to uphold Dutch law, including (although he did not explicitly say so) the venerable laws and traditions dating from the seventeenth century regarding religious freedom and the rights of religious asylum. Seyss-Inquart did not even specifically mention the Jews.

And so the pogroms that the Jews had feared would occur in Holland, as they already had in Poland and elsewhere in the occupied eastern European countries, did not take place. As Seyss-Inquart's emollient speech demonstrated, the Germans, at least at that early juncture of the war, were still trying to win over the Dutch. As far as the bombing of Rotterdam was concerned, the Luftmaffe said, there had been a communications error.

Over the next few years, as Seyss-Inquart and his cohorts realised how deeply most Dutch resented them, Germans would see the futility of his wish, but at that point, while the Germans were still hoping eventually to incorporate Holland into the Greater Reich itself a hope that Seyss-Inquart would eventually make explicit in early 1942, before abandoning it soon thereafter), the general policy was to be nice to the Dutch, which also meant being nice to their Jews'.

Holland's 'Jewish problem' could be dealt with later. But for now, the tune was softly, softly. A German military band even came to Scheveningen in June to serenade the crowds.

Only one restriction was placed on the Jewish population: Jewish members of the civil anti-aircraft service had to resign. And that was it.

That wasn't so bad, was it?

'It was very strange,' said Flory. 'Suddenly there were Germans around.? A large number of Wehrmacht were billeted in Scheveningen. And yet they didn't seem to be shooting anyone. Quite the opposite, in fact; many Dutchmen were impressed by the 'correct' behaviour of the occupying soldiers, just as many Frenchmen were at first impressed by the discipline and tact of the German troops who now came into their midst.

On 29 June, Prince Bernhard's birthday, Seyss-Inquart realised that the job of winning Dutch hearts and minds might be a little more difficult than anticipated when, in a spontaneous show of support for the exiled prince and the House of Orange, Dutchmen sported white carnations on their lapels, as Bernhard was famous for doing. Some even went so far as to hang the Dutch tricolour out of their windows. The Reichskommissar was annoyed, but not deterred. The Dutch, he was confi-dent, would see the light in the end. Meanwhile, as a precautionary measure, Dutch mothers were forbidden to name their children Wilhelmina, Juliana or Bernhard. But that was just a slap on the hand.

The pre-existing civil bureaucracy was essentially allowed to remain in place. Only a thin layer of Germans and local (more often than not incompetent) NSB members were imposed from above; the vast majority of Dutch civil servants had no official contact with the Germans, which suited them fine, and kept on working at their jobs without protest, continuing to do so for most of the five-year-long occupation. Some, especially those involved with essential services like rationing, would claim that such cooperation was necessary for the nation's well-being and that if they had protested or resigned they would have been replaced by less competent NSB types (as later, those who did resign were and the country would have suffered even more than it ultimately did.In any event, the byword of the day for the civil service in 1940 (and for roughly four years afterwards) was cooperation. Thus, when, as a so-called 'precautionary measure', the Germans asked mid- and top-level civil servants to sign the 'Aryan attestation', in which the 12,000-odd respondents were asked to state their religious affiliation, only one solitary conscientious objector refused. He was fired. As Christopher Browning observes in his recent, definitive work, The Origins of the Final Solution, the harnessing of a compliant, dutiful, and impeccably efficient Dutch officialdom to implement Nazi racial policy was to be one of the keys to explain the record fatality rate of Dutch Jews in comparison to other west European countries.

The Franks were not quite as taken in. And yet, and yet... everything seemed nearly OK. Trying to be practical, Flory sent Dorrit and Sybil out to buy shoes. That would be the first thing the Germans would want, she figured. And so the girls went out shopping, while the Franks all tried to get used to the perturbing Nazi sights and sounds that now confronted them everywhere, on the street, on the beach, on the radio.

Still, maybe things would be OK. Of course, they didn't have very much choice: they were trapped.

Then, in September 1940, a new German edict ordered foreign Jews, including German Jews, to move away from the coast on the grounds that they might abet a future English invasion. This was the first move in a protracted campaign to isolate and concentrate the entire Jewish popula-tion, an insidious cat-and-mouse game that the Germans would play for the next two years - and one that would end in the destruction of Dutch Jewry.

As Seyss-Inquart said at his 1946 trial in Nuremberg, It happened step by step.? This was one of the first steps, the first swipe of the cat's paw.

At this point there were concentration camps for Jews and other 'crim-inal elements' - but no extermination camps, at least not yet. Perhaps a few hundred Jews - out of a total population of 140,000 - went underground at this time, no more. There was no need.

The impact of the unpleasant new edict on the Franks and the 2,000-odd German Jews affected by the relocation order was mitigated by the fact that those affected were granted a sizeable area in which to relocate.

Instead of being herded into a small ghetto-like neighbourhood, as many feared - and as had occurred in Poland - the Franks and their fellow deracinated Jews were merely enjoined to move to a new locale at least forty kilometres (twenty-five miles) from the coast. An inconvenience, yes, but not so bad.

The relocation order gave the Franks only three days to move.

Nonetheless, after a short, frenetic search, Myrtil was able to find a large house in Hilversum, the medium-sized 'garden city' twenty miles east of Amsterdam, for his wife, daughters and elderly and increasingly frail mother-in-law. And so, after a short intervening stay in the town of Bussum, just outside Hilversum, where they rented an apartment for a few weeks, they moved late in 1940, the first year of the German occu-pation. They were even allowed to take their furniture with them, although Myrtil and Flory chose not to, a decision they didn't take with much thought. As they later discovered, it was very well that they didn't.

Although the Franks missed the sea and their friends in Scheveningen, the family soon became attached to their new home in Hilversum, which was actually larger than the one they had had in Scheveningen, and came with a pleasant garden, something that Hilversum was famous for. It was located on a leafy, well-tended street - Frans Halslaan, named after the famous Dutch painter - round the corner from the neighbourhood school.

Myrtil continued to struggle to make ends meet, but, as Flory later said, 'We tried to get as much out of life as we could. We did a little entertaining,' she recollected. 'We even went mushroom hunting. Of course, things were getting more difficult, I could see that. Basically, we were happy to be alive?

Dorrit would later recall the seventeen months the Franks spent in Hilversum as 'surreal'. 'It was like living in the twilight zone,' she said.

Still allowed to work, she resumed her apprenticeship at yet another design studio in Amsterdam. She also fell in with a new high-spirited circle of friends, young Jews from the Hilversum-Utrecht area, mostly in their late teens and early twenties. Every Saturday, ten or twelve of them would get together in the Franks' living room on Frans Halslaan to talk and gossip and dance to Big Band music or java jive.

The sensation of being in limbo, of not knowing what the seemingly omnipotent Germans - who were currently marching on Russia - would do next, lent such occasions a manic intensity.

Already, by the spring of 1941, there had been some violent incidents in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, one of which, in February, had resulted in the death of a Dutch militiaman, to which the Cermans reacted by staging a raid on Jonas Daniël Meyerplein in Amsterdam in which over

400 Jewish men were swept up off the street, never to be heard of again.

Meanwhile, an angry Dr H. Böhmcker, Seyss-Inquart's special commissioner for the city of Amsterdam, summoned the leaders of the two Jewish communities (Ashkenazi and Sephardic) and insisted that they form a twenty-member Fudenrat, or Jewish Council, similar to ones the Germans formed in other occupied countries, as a means of transmitting their orders to, and better controlling, the general population.

Amsterdammers reacted to the raids, and what was perceived as the increasing persecution of the Jewish population, by participating in an extraordinary strike. Led by Communist activists, the Februaristaking, as it was called, quickly spread across the city, affecting transport, department stores, shipyards and factories. For nearly two days the entire industrial centre of Amsterdam was shut down. The 15,000 workers at the Philips plant in Hilversum also joined in, as did some in nearby Haarlem and Laandam.

'A seething indignation filled the city,' noted the underground news-paper, Het Parool, later. 'Were we going to look on passively while our Jewish brothers were beaten?" The strike, the resistance paper noted, 'was primarily a strong protest against the scandalous anti-Semitic terror which the German barbarians started in our country?.

The Jews of Amsterdam and environs were, of course, heartened by the action, which Louis de Jong would later describe as 'the only anti-pogrom strike in history. As Geert Mak put it, "The Jew knew, if only for a moment, that [he] was not alone?

But it was only a moment. Initially taken by surprise by the action, Rauter, Böhmcker and their German colleagues soon suppressed it with the aid of a German police battalion and two SS Totenkopf police battal-ions, as Het Parool describes:

The German police [were] sent into the streets in innumerable trucks and they began to shoot everyone who did not get out of the way. Machine guns were brought into position on streetcorners and swept the corners clean. On many occasions hand grenades were used... And through this din one heard German curses and the hoarse cannibal battle screams of the uniformed Nazis charging into the unarmed masses.

The strong Nazi response effectively brought the strike to an end within forty-eight hours. By that time nine Amsterdammers had been shot dead.

And then the extraordinary moment, one of the most stirring examples of popular resistance to the Nazi persecution of the Jews to take place anywhere in Europe during the war, as well as the last one to take place in Holland, was over, never to be repeated, at least in Holland.* One of those who disappeared during the raids that precipitated the Februaristaking was Dorrit's friend Ed Weinreb. One day in February, she had had an appointment to meet her old tennis partner in Amsterdam.

But Ed didn't turn up. Several weeks later, his parents received a letter from the authorities stating that he had been sent to the German concentration camp at Mauthausen, but that he was all right.

By May 1941, every one of the 400 Jews picked up in the February raids, including Ed Weinreb, was dead.

But no one knew this immediately: the Germans would stagger the death notices so that they seemed accidental. Despite everything, it was still possible to believe that things would turn out for the best, if one wished, and most Jews fervently so wished.

And what was that knock on the door?

This is what this strange interlude was like, if you were a Jew trapped in occupied Holland. It was, of course, distressing to see the signs in the parks that declared 'BEPERKTE BEWEGINGSVRIJHEID VOOR JODEN' - limited liberty of movement for Jews- but at least Jews still had some liberty. All they had to do was to follow the clearly worded instructions of the Foodsche Raad, the Jewish Council, as transmitted from German headquarters, promulgated each week in Het Foodsche Weekblad, the Jewish weekly, undersigned by the two co-chairmen of the Council, Abraham Asscher and Dr David Cohen, and everything would work out.

That was the prevailing feeling amongst most Dutch Jews. Even Myrtil subscribed to this compliant attitude.

In November 1941, the German authorities ordered the Dutch to make a detailed census of the Jewish population, and the heads of all Jewish households were ordered to report to their local police station to fill out the census forms. Virtually all complied. The Dutch civil authorities,

Two years later, in September 1943, in an equally stirring, mass form of resistance, the Danish people, spearheaded by their king, Christian X, and the Danish churches, as well as the Swedish government, succeeded in rescuing virtually the entire (albeit considerably smaller) Jewish population of 7,200 of that occupied country, along with 700 non-Jewish relatives, and trasporting them to neutral Sweden and safety.

Unaware of, or oblivious to the possible uses to which such a census might be put, agreed to carry it out; across the border in Belgium, by contrast, the less cowed and/or compliant authorities refused a similar request.

But the obedient Dutch officials agreed to execute the census, which would soon become a key instrument in the continuing Jewish persecu-tion. The spirit of the Februaristaking of nine months before (to which the great majority of serving public officials were immune anyway had evidently vanished. There was really nothing to worry about, the friendly Dutch policemen assured the tens of thousands of weary-looking Jewish men around the country, including Myrtil who dutifully reported for the census. Not to worry, just a formality.

That month, November 1941, thanks to the unceasing efforts of Joseph Goebbels, now in his ninth year as Nazi Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, and still as Jew-obsessed as ever, the first transport made up from the sixty thousand or so Jews still living in Berlin left for Poland.

In an essay in Das Reich, the 'prestige' Nazi publication, Goebbels justified the 'evacuations' (as the transports were euphemistically called) and made a chilling prophecy which echoed a similar one Hitler made in 1939:

'If the Jews involved in international high finance were to succeed in dragging the peoples of the world into another war,' the Reich's official hate-monger declared, 'the result would be the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.' Two months later that prophecy, which was already being translated into reality in Poland, would be turned into systematic, planned reality at the Wannsee Conference.

But few Dutchmen, including Jews, read Das Reich and, even if they did, they would doubtless have called Goebbels' prophecy propoganda.

The Germans continued to issue new and incrementally more humiliating regulations through the autumn of 1941 and the spring of 1942, including ones forbidding Jews from travelling or moving to another house without a permit (7/11/41), from entering non-Jewish hotels, theatres, and swimming pools (21/11/41), from driving cars (1/1/42), from marrying non-Jews (23/1/42), and so on and on and on: the list was getting to be quite long now. If Myrtil had plans for taking the family

'under' at that point, he kept them to himself. Everything would be OK, he would say when he returned to Frans Halslaan from his onerous salesman rounds. Meanwhile, Dorrit still continued to go to Amsterdam to work as an apprentice designer.

And then Dorrit fell in love with one of the Jewish boys who came to her house on Saturdays. His name was Edgar Reich and he was nineteen.

But Edgar and his family were almost immediately sent to Westerbork, the German internment camp in the north-east..

Six months later, on Friday 15 May 1942, Dorrit - a six-pointed yellow Jewish star conspicuously affixed to her left breast - is sitting aboard the 1.15 p.m. train out of Amsterdam, bound for Assen, in north-eastern Holland, a trip of approximately three hours. Some of the other, un-starred passengers in Dorrit's second-class carriage glance at her, doubtless wondering who this 'special' passenger is.

Dorrit looks away and stares out of the window, oblivious to the attention, engrossed in thought - benign thoughts, mostly, for Dorrit is in love and she is going to visit her fiancé, Edgar Reich, in a place called Kamp Westerbork. Edgar is interned there, has been since February. It's not so bad, he told her the last time they met, in Amsterdam in late March, when he was allowed to leave Westerbork and return to Amsterdam in order to register for the new Jewish census.

Now - after receiving special permission for the long trip from the helpful, if stressed, staff at the foodsche Raad - Dorrit is about to see what Westerbork is like for herself.

As the steam-powered train gets under way, Dorrit looks up to check her bicycle, parked at the end of the carriage; she has brought it along in order to cover the last leg of her trip, from Assen to the farmhouse where, again with the aid of the Jewish Council, she has arranged to lodge for two evenings.

As the gabled roofline of Amsterdam gives way to the blur of semidetached houses of the suburbs, Dorrit returns to the security of her private internal cinema, replaying scenes from the short reel entitled Dorrit and Edgar, in between occasional bored looks at the vista whizzing by; Dorrit is particularly familiar with this stretch, having traversed it many times on her way from her job in Amsterdam to the Franks' just-evacuated home on Frans Halslaan. The interior panorama is much more interesting.

Engrossed in her own thoughts the young Jewess replays the Saturday evening in the Franks' living room in Hilversum the previous September, when she first met Edgar, an Austrian Jew whose family moved to Utrecht from Rotterdam at the same time that the Franks were forced to evacuate The Hague. Thinking back, she recalls how impressed she was with the suave nineteen-year-old commercial artist with the curly blond hair; impressed, but not attracted. Perhaps they stole glances at each other, amidst the slightly forced frivolity of their cosy little group. But it was not love at first sight - at least not on Dorrit's part. Edgar, though, evidently took an immediate liking to her, at least so he claimed later.

Dorrit glances out of the clean window. The train has arrived at Hilversum, and she catches sight of the city's most famous landmark, the Raadhuis, the Cubist yellow-brick city hall, its tower concealed by a hideous green camouflage net: nervous that Allied bombers would use the tower to help them locate Wehrmacht headquarters, located nearby, the Germans, oblivious to the architectural wonder in their midst, at first wanted to paint the tower green, a plan from which they were dissuaded with some difficulty by local officials. Hence the net welcoming Dorrit home.

Home, she muses, as the train takes on a typical midday, midweek complement of mostly students and elderly passengers. Home. A curious concept. What does home mean now? When - and where - will we ever be home again?

Too depressing to think about. Dissolve to another, happier scene from Dorrit and Edgar, one that took place at this very station, the first week of January, several months after the star-crossed lovers met, when Edgar volunteered to walk Dorrit to the station - their crush was mutual then

- so she could catch the train to her job in Amsterdam and he could get the train back to Utrecht. Instead of the chaste kiss on the cheek that Dorrit expected, Edgar suddenly kissed her full on the lips and confessed that he was in love with her, as the stony-faced Dutchmen standing on the platform looked on with varying degrees of interest.

Now that is a scene worth dwelling on, Dorrit remarks to herself with a smile, as the train finally pulls out of the station.

At the next few stops Dorrit barely looks up, for she has seen them all before. Now, however, an hour out of Amsterdam, the exterior scenery begins to change noticeably. As the train swings to the north upon leaving Amersfoort, it occurs to Dorrit that in the nine years she has lived in Holland she has never been to the north of the country before. The novel aspect of the trip is underlined as the locomotive nears Hardwijk and the vast, blue, tranquil expanse of the IJsselmeer - site of the great southeast polder which the Dutch land reclamation authorities had hoped to build before the war dynamited their plans - appears in the carriage window.

Dorrit takes in the pleasing diorama before her as the train curves to the east and plunges into forestland, then hungrily returns to the feature for today. In her mind's eye appears a montage of pleasing scenes from the weeks that followed the kiss: Edgar and Dorrit dancing alone in her living room as 'Ole Guappa', their favourite song, wafts from her scratchy but reliable record player; Sybil, who already knew the dashing artiste from their Saturday group, also approved.

Then, of course, how could she not? Anyone could see that Edgar is a dreamboat. And, as the engraved ring that Dorrit now happily twirls around her finger proves - the same ring they hastily purchased in Utrecht, the night before Edgar and his parents were dispatched to Westerbork, to confirm their love (they hesitated to call it an engagement ring) - he belongs to her!

The train reaches the halfway point: Zwolle, ancient capital of Overijssel, former member of the Hanseatic League. Slowly they cross the railway bridge over the tiny Zwarte Water - one of numerous bridges the Dutch army destroyed in May 1940 in a futile attempt to staunch the Nazi tide, now rebuilt and in business again, serving Holland's German masters, just like new.

V = VICTORIE, WANT DUITSCHLAND WINT VOOR EUROPA

OP ALLE FRONTEN' ('V = Victory for Germany on all fronts') - shouts

a propaganda banner stretched over the awning of the station, part of the Germans' strained effort to subvert the meaning of the angrily scrawled

'V's that have sprouted on Dutch walls to mean victory for the Allies. In May 1942, Berlin is still trying to convert the hearts and minds of its subject Dutch 'friends'.

'Victory on all fronts - God forbid, Dorrit mutters to herself - even though the Germans do seem to be winning on all fronts of late - before the train heads off again in the direction of Drenthe, the dreary, windswept north-east province sometimes known as 'the Siberia of Holland'.

The next station is Meppel, current population 5,000; current Jewish population 260; home of the representative of the Jewish Council for Drenthe, the esteemed Meyer Lobstein. Recently, Lobstein had appealed to Dutch Jews, worried by the German authorities' effort to isolate them from the rest of the population, to obey the authorities and not resist, a message that was also consonant with Dutch legalistic impulses.

Obedience, not resistance - that was the right way, the Jewish way, the widely respected Lobstein asserted.

Dorrit herself, like most Dutch Jews, is undecided about the best course of action, content to take each day of the German occupation as it comes, preferring not to think about where all this - the yellow star, the Franks' enforced move to Amsterdam, Edgar's deportation to Westerbork - is leading. Denial, or partial denial, contemporary psychologists would call this state of mind, which the soothing pronouncements of Lobstein and other deluded members of the Jewish Council only serve to reinforce.

Still, it is hard for Dorrit to put out of her mind some of the traumatic scenes she had witnessed in recent months, as the Germans have played out their horrid game with the hapless Jewish population; particularly the unforgettable one that took place on the platform of the Utrecht train station three months ago, when the Reichs and 150 other 'stateless' Jewish families finally, reluctantly, reported for embarkation to Westerbork, under the watchful eyes of the security police.

Now, despite Dorrit's best efforts to suppress it, that dreadful image swamps her mind: the clusters of weeping tearful deportees and worried, despairing, disconsolate friends and loved ones who have come to see them off, reluctantly letting go of each other as they board the dread train; others, already on board, shouting or reaching out through the open carriage windows to clutch the hands of their friends... the knots of uniformed German police in place to ensure that this, the second mass shipment of human cargo for Westerbork - the first, comprised of an unfortunate group of other relocated Jews from the Hilversum area, who had reportedly brought their furniture with them (which the Germans were intent on seizing) - goes off without a hitch; all wreathed in the swirling, Dante-esque smoke of the impatient locomotive...

And there is Dorrit herself, a pathetic, wretched mess, the yolks of the eggs Edgar's mother has given her running down the front of her coat - she has inadvertently crushed them against herself in the press of the crowd - waving goodbye.

Enough. Dorrit looks out. The landscape outside is all barren moors.

Assen, her final destination, is approaching.

Dorrit fast-forwards her internal reel to the somewhat happier scene of her last meeting with Edgar, six weeks ago, in Amsterdam. Somewhat to his surprise, Edgar was released from Westerbork for forty-eight hours in order to register for the new census. Hastily Dorrit arranged for the two to spend the night at the home of her cousin, Liesl. The understanding Liesl gave the couple a room of their own.

Edgar didn't talk much about his life at Westerbork; obviously, it wasn't very pleasant. The Dutch camp commandant, Schol, had instituted some changes in the camp regime in recent weeks that gave the place more of a prison-like feel, he told her quietly as they lay side by side in Liesl's house in the old Jewish quarter. For example, daily roll-call, never exactly a joy to begin with, Edgar drolly noted, had been moved up to early dawn.

There was also an abominable new unit of camp police - Jewish police, Füdischer Ordungdienst, so-called OD - to augment the Dutch police at the camp, Schol having been impressed with the argument of one of the so-called Long-Term Residents, a German Jew by the name of Kurt Schlesinger, who had been at Westerbork since 1940, to allow the internees to administer and police themselves rather than have the Germans do it.

Jews policing Jews: it sounded horrible. But he had no complaints, Edgar said, lighting a cigarette.

Dorrit's reverie is interrupted by the Dutch conductor's flat voice informing her that she has arrived at her final destination. Looking out at the unfamiliar train station, festooned with the by now all-too-familiar German propaganda posters, she moves to retrieve her bicycle, and strides off into the night to find the farm where she will stay. She is smiling, for tomorrow she will see her lover again.

When she eventually arrives at the farmhouse, she finds it is a primitive place - no running water, no hot water, no heat. There is a basin of cold water waiting for her in her room, a Delft basin she will later recall, Delft blue. The long trip has exhausted her; she falls asleep immediately.

In the morning, the farmer points her in the direction of the camp. It isn't hard to find, he says, gesturing in the direction of the refugee camp that the Dutch government built in 1939 - before the occupation - for the internment of Jews who had illegally entered the country. After all, there isn't much else out there. In six weeks, a motorised flotilla from the Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei des SD (SD), complete with a company of SS troops, will arrive to take formal charge of Westerbork, and this hitherto minimum-security internment camp will be transformed into something quite different and more sinister: a "police transit camp', surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers; a hellish place whence each week for approximately the next one hundred weeks a thousand - sometimes more, sometimes less - of its angry, weeping, resigned inhabitants will be herded by the OD on to trains bound for labour deployment camps' in the East,

'camps' with names like Auschwitz, Sobibor and Bergen-Belsen.

However, at this particular juncture in Westerbork's tortured history, while this God-forsaken place in the wilds of Drenthe is still administered by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior - and before anyone in Holland outside Adolf Eichmann's satellite offices in Amsterdam has any notion of what the designation labour deployment' really means - there is no reason house in the old Jewish quarter. For example, daily roll-call, never exactly a joy to begin with, Edgar drolly noted, had been moved up to early dawn.

Jews policing Jews: it sounded horrible. But he had no complaints, Edgar said, lighting a cigarette.

"camps' with names like Auschwitz, Sobibor and Bergen-Belsen.

However, at this particular juncture in Westerbork's tortured history, while this God-forsaken place in the wilds of Drenthe is still administered by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior-and before anyone in Holland outside Adolf Eichmann's satellite offices in Amsterdam has any notion of what the designation labour deployment' really means - there is no reason why Dorrit's farmer host should hesitate to give a Jewish girl directions to Westerbork, nor any reason why she ought to fear going there.

And so Dorrit eagerly pedals off, down a sandy, windswept path. The ride is a long one, the birds circling overhead her only companions. Later she estimates the journey back and forth takes an hour.

And then the outline of one of the larger camp barracks appears on the horizon, followed by the two hundred smaller 'cottages, row upon immaculate row, each with its tiny furze-fringed garden, the yellow flowers just beginning to bloom. And at the entrance - just as he promised in his last missive - there is Edgar, standing outside the cottage assigned to the Reich family, looking as debonair as possible for the occasion, waiting for her, cigarette dangling from his lips.

They embrace. Edgar leads Dorrit inside, where she is warmly greeted by his parents, who are nearly as thrilled to see this emissary from the

'free' world and their former normal lives as their lovelorn son is. You must be hungry, her hosts say to the wayfarer. She is indeed. Good, Frau Reich replies, struggling to maintain her composure, she has cooked something special for her on her electric plate! Dorrit will forget what she ate; she is not concentrating on the food. But it is good.

And so the happily reunited lovers sit down to their specially cooked lunch under the proud eyes of the Reichs, in their little cottage in the moors, almost as if they were all on holiday.

Later, Edgar takes Dorrit for a walk, making wry comments as they go - there is the field where he lines up for roll-call, lovely place, isn't it, he says drolly... there is the camp hospital, actually it's quite good, he says - until they reach the Big Barracks, the long wooden building in the centre of the vast encampment. The Big Barracks doubles as Westerbork's main administration building, and, on weekend evenings like this, as camp entertainment centre. This, he explains, leading Dorrit inside, is where the camp orchestra plays. He plays accordion. The orchestra is quite good, Edgar says seriously; recently it gave a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the composer Felix Mendelssohn (descendant of Moses). He is not sure what is on tonight. Dorrit wishes she could stay. But she can't, it is getting dark. She must leave soon, or risk getting lost out there on the unforgiving moors.

Anticipating this, Edgar has already summoned the members of the orchestra to the Big Barracks to meet his attractive fiancée. One by one he proudly introduces Dorrit to his musical colleagues and fellow internees. Obviously, he has given her a big build-up.

And then it is time to go.

But Dorrit's visit to Kamp Westerbork-which sixty years later she will recall in minute detail, including her exact train of thought - is not over. The Jewish Council has given her permission to come back the next day, Saturday.

So the following morning she pedals back to the camp for a few more precious hours with her beloved. This time Dorrit and Edgar want to be alone, and they walk off into the heather for as much privacy as the circumstances allow. Six weeks hence such a walk will not be possible.

Yet later, after Westerbork's true function as a transit station to hell has become clear, Dorrit will marvel that she ever visited it at all.

But she is glad that she did. For this will be the last time she and Edgar will ever see each other.

As they embrace in the heather and talk fitfully about 'the future', it is Edgar's turn to be worried, and Dorrit's to calm him. Tll come back soon,' she promises. Later, she will recall distinctly that there was a dog barking in the distance.

And then, with a hug and a wave, Dorrit is off to catch the train back to the shadows of Amsterdam.

CHAPTER 9

The Girl Next Door

It was taking much too long. The constant fear and maiting were unbearable.

Herbert Boucher, Miracle of Survival

Four years ago today catastrophe and the Germans came to Holland. Since then the Dutch in Holland and abroad, their exiled Government and their Queen, have lived with but one thought: preparation for the day of liberation and restoration. As that day draws nearer, they are becoming increasingly amare of one fact: whether liberation be near or far, when it comes there will be little Left of the Holland of May 1940.

The Times, 10 May 1944

And so, to their collective stupefaction, the Franks began the tenth year of their odyssey of flight from the Germans - a journey that had begun when they had first arrived in The Hague from Berlin- and their second year as onderduikers.

Interestingly, Flory, Dorrit and Sybil would later remember few events from this middle phase of their submersion.

'It's funny,' Flory said, looking back. "Those three years seem to melt together. You get used to the idea that the outside doesn't exist."

Summer melted into autumn, autumn into winter. The basic routine continued: the Franks got up, did their exercises, sewed, read, laughed, argued, worried, went to sleep - when they could get to sleep - got up again, and tried to pretend that the outside world really didn't exist.

The occasional mis-targeted Allied bomb tended to shatter this illu-sion, of course.

Myrtil and their Dutch friends did bring news from The Outside, some of which was actually encouraging: in the Mediterranean, the Allies had invaded Sicily, then the Italian mainland. Mussolini had been ousted.

But the Mediterranean was simply too far away. Unlike Anne Frank and other onderduikers, who obsessively followed the news throughout their time in hiding, her four kinsmen in The Hague cared only about when the Allies were finally going to invade Europe. However, Churchill and General Sir Alan Brooke delayed, wary of the casualties a premature operation would bring.

In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels told a German magazine in April that invasion of the Continent was 'a thing impossible'. The shock of Stalingrad had worn off. "The Axis has a free hand in the East and commands all possibilities for the offensive,' he declared. Events on the 'periphery of the war' - by which the propaganda minister presumably was referring. to the Russian front, where the Wehrmacht had largely gone on the defensive but still commanded large swathes of territory, and in North Africa, where the Germans had been completely evicted - were undergoing

'certain revisions'.

. But, he added, "The centre is intact.?

As John Keegan notes, Goebbels's renewed confidence was not entirely

misplaced:

In midsummer 1943, a year before the Anglo-American invasion of Europe, Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht still occupied all the territory it had gained in the blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939-41 and most of its Russian conquests of 1941-42.

It also retained its foothold on the coast of North Africa... The Russian counteroffensives at Stalingrad and Kursk had pushed back the perimeter of Hitler's Europe in the east. Yet he or his allies still controlled the whole of mainland Europe, except for neutral Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden. The Nazi war economy, though overshadowed by the growing power of America's, outmatched both that of Britain and that of the Soviet Union except in the key areas of tank and aircraft production. Without direct intervention by the western Allies on the continent - an intervention that would centre on the commitment of a large American army - Hitler could count on prolonging his military dominance for years to come.

The centre of Hitler's Third Reich, including the Netherlands and the other European countries Germany had overrun and annexed, was indeed intact.

Within the Frank household the tension and tedium of being in hiding were broken by the visits of Jeanne and Annie and her sisters. 'I don't think that I had dinner, recalled Jeanne, who visited the fugitives after she finished work at a local bank. 'Anyway, that wouldn't have been proper, since the family needed its food for itself. They asked me what was going on in my life and what had happened to me, and I would try to tell them.

Basically, I just tried to cheer them up.'

Sometimes, Flory recalled, Jeanne's chat about her life outside (where she had just become engaged) would have the opposite effect on Dorrit and Sybil. "The girls would say, "Our youth goes," and I would say, "Be happy you are still alive." The girls would be envious of Jeanne, because she could still go out. And I would say, "Be happy you are still together.

Other people are dispersed."

Sometimes the Franks would allow their imaginations to wander into the past, back to the former days when they lived in a well-appointed apartment with a grand piano, a humming Chrysler at the ready, and a uniformed chauffeur named Schwann. But that wasn't a very constructive train of thought either. So the melancholy foursome would sit in the dark, distant from the world in which 'normal people' like Jeanne and Annie lived and loved or took strolls in the Haagse Bos, or along the Noordeinde, one of the main shopping streets of The Hague, which was located a few blocks away from Pieter van den Zandestraat; the world in which they could go to the cinema (though that meant having to sit through Nazi propaganda films these days); a world still firmly controlled by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who lived on a great estate in Clingendael, near the Scheveningen dunes, with his devoutly fascist wife, Gerda, and his daughter; a world in which a joint German-Dutch team of detectives assigned to the offices of IVB4 were out hunting 'criminals' like the Franks at this very moment, assigned to just outside their flimsy door.

Myrtil, the commander and quartermaster of the cell, continued with his hair-raising sorties into The Outside, cautiously emerging from the flat, screwing up his features into his doctor persona before he opened the door, and swimming back with parcels of food and other items he somehow obtained from his friend L., the art dealer, or some other black-market contact.

It was always a shock - a welcome shock, of course - when he returned.

For a moment he would decompress, re-adjusting to the dim light and rancid air of the flat. Then, like the proverbial hunter-gatherer, he would reveal his harvest.

'I remember once we got strawberries,' Sybil recalled. 'That was an event."

'Once "Til brought back some baking chocolate,' said Flory, recalling another Santa Claus-like moment. 'We also had a little pastille to make tea. Of course, there was no coffee, just substitute coffee, but we were glad to have that as well'

Sometimes, to supplement food supplies, Myrtil would also bring reading material: penny dreadfuls, old travel books, even American maga-zines, like Esquire; apparently L. was a subscriber. Flory recalled an advertisement in one of these which seemed to sum up both the pathos and the absurdity of their predicament. 'One of [the magazines] showed a cartoon of a girl staring at her naked boyfriend and saying, "Clothes certainly do make the man." I'll never forget that.'

Amongst the diverse reading material Myrtil brought back with him to number 14 was an old novel called Juan in America by Eric Linklater.

By this time, the entire family had read or reread the book and were familiar with the dramatis personae, one of whom was named 'Crying Wonnie'.

' 'And now Crying Wonnie is going to sleep!' Myrtil said one night, as the four of them turned in, creating a much-needed spring of laughter, as well as a catchy nom de guerre for the Jewish swashbuckler.

From that point on, Myrtil Frank was also known as Wonnie.

Humour didn't always work. Within their flat, the Franks had comparatively little room to move - certainly much less than, for example, their eight fellow onderduikers at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam. Otto Frank's family were sometimes able to leave their 'secret annexe' and walk around his empty offices (which might ultimately have been their undoing). They had much more room to move and stretch out, as did the eight onder-duikers Corrie ten Boom sheltered, who normally had the run of her house.

Everything is relative: some onderduikers, including ones who were wedged into spaces above toilets (as one Jewish Hagenaar was), had to make do with much less.

For some, the stress of prolonged indeterminate confinement, combined with the feeling that they were being watched (which all onder-duikers had to assume, had physical side-effects. One Jewish boy was reported to have lost his power of speech after being left alone in a room for six months. Others suffered long depressive bouts. There were suicides. A few who felt that they couldn't take the strain of remaining underground even gave themselves up and allowed themselves to be deported. Some caused such difficulties for their hosts that they were forced to surface and look for other hiding places - or had to flee because their hosts themselves went mad with the strain; apparently this was what occurred to Corrie ten Boom's sister, who one day inexplicably went to the authorities to report herself for giving shelter to onderduikers. She was immediately imprisoned

As Anne Frank records in Het Achterhuis - or The Secret Annexe - as her wartime journal was originally entitled, by their second year in hiding, the eight onderduikers at 263 Prinsengracht were beginning to get on each other's nerves. A major point of irritation was money - or the lack of it.

In November 1943, their 'sublessees', the Pelses, exhausted the funds which they had brought with them, which led to considerable strife.

At 14 Pieter van den Zandestraat, money was also shrinking, but Myrtil still had some cash. He kept what he had with Annie, a precaution against thieves and robbers, another problem as the desperation of the general populace rose.

Mostly, however, there was simply too much togetherness.

'It was not easy to have three women living together the whole day,' said Jeanne. 'Flory was a dear - at least to me she always seemed a dear.

But sometimes Dorrit and Sybil would get crazy?

Sometimes pressures from outside the hiding place - fear of being watched, of betrayal, and of being bombed - combined with tensions from within to cause an explosion.

'Sometimes we were not sensitive to each other's feelings,' Sybil put it, diplomatically.

So the Franks bickered, or rather, pantomime-bickered, making contorted gestures with their faces to compensate for their necessarily muted voices, while above ground, the destruction of Dutch Jewry entered its final act.

On 29 September, the last large-scale round-up of Jews in Amsterdam took place. Over 10,000, including Asscher and Cohen, the leaders of the Foodsche Raad, were sent to the Nazis' 'model concentration camp' at Theresienstadt, before ultimately being shipped to Bergen-Belsen. The two would survive the war, but most of their staff perished.

A photo taken in Amsterdam at the pre-assembly point on the Polderweg, after one of the last razzias, captures the desperate mood of the deportees. Dated May 1943, it shows a large group of dazed and despondent people sitting with their luggage. A Good Samaritan nurse, perhaps from the Red Cross, is standing amidst this sea of despair with a cup of water, trying her best to help. And in the centre of the picture, a girl of seven or eight, a yellow star affixed to her dress, her hair neatly done up as if for a Sunday outing, faces the camera with a baffled look.

At Westerbork, fewer carriages were needed now. But still the trains continued to roll. September saw the last three shipments to Sobibor: on

7 September one with 987 'passengers'; on the 14th another with 1,005

- the last train carrying more than 1,000 deportees. One more on 26 September contained 979 of the condemned. Thenceforth - with the exception of the Theresienstadt train carrying Asscher and Cohen and other 'privileged' prisoners - trains from Westerbork would once more be routed to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, where there was capacity again.

Rauter had fulfilled his promise to Himmler. The previous July he had assumed that the deportation of the bulk of Holland's Jewish population could be accomplished in fourteen months. By October 1943, some 90,324 Jews - close to 70 per cent of Holland's pre-war Jewish population - had successfully been deported to the camps.

In neighbouring Belgium, following one of the last razzias in that country, on 3 September 1943, 'such a significant protest erupted from civilian and religious leaders that the apprehended Jews were released', notes Gerald Reitlinger in The Final Solution, one of the first major postwar studies of the Holocaust. In November 1943, as previously noted, in a truly inspiring episode of resistance, large numbers of Danes banded together to rescue the bulk of Denmark's small population of 7,000 Jews and smuggle them across the Baltic to neutral Sweden, directly under the Germans' noses, thus providing one of the few 'happy-ending' stories of the Nazi genocide.

But there were no such happy endings in Holland.

As the Dutch journalist Geert Mak writes in Amsterdam, his popular biography of the city, the Dutch had become numbed to the sight of the trucks and trains taking Jews away: 'The shock had dissipated.' Just as during the French Revolution, 'the first tumbril on its way to the guillotine had been an event, the tenth no longer attracted comment'.

On 5 October, Seyss-Inquart issued instructions for the treatment of those Jews who had not been deported, including the 8,610 Jews in mixed marriages - many of whom would soon be deported nevertheless - plus those with 'exotic exemptions', amongst them a German-Jewish Olympic champion, and the son-in-law of the former royal librarian. Holland's

'Jewish problem' had been reduced to a manageable size.

That left the estimated 20,000 Jews who had dived under and who had not been discovered or betrayed. However, given the excellent progress that had been made as the temptation to claim the bounties on Jewish fugitives increased, the Germans were confident that they would ultimately succeed on that front. Most of the recalcitrant members of that group would either be discovered and deported, or would perish underground because their supplies had run out.

The Germans also reported success in apprehending those who helped them. Corrie ten Boom had been betrayed and arrested in February 1944, though the eight Jews she was sheltering at that time miraculously escaped detection. All in all, the German authorities were pleased with their progress in this area as well.

The harrowing silence in the former Jewish areas of Amsterdam, including the River Quarter, where both Frank families had once lived, where entire streets which once had teemed with life stood deserted, bore mute testament to the Germans' outstanding success. Grete Weil in her book Tramhalte Beethovenstraat (Tramstop Beethovenstraat) described just such a street, now inhabited only by a handful of onderduikers or Jews with false ID:

In the Beethovenstraat the nights were still. Now and then a car passed by, sometimes [the onderduikers] heard footsteps and pricked up their ears. If this was the sound of jackboots, they crouched motionless. Often there was an air-raid warning, the crack of anti-aircraft guns, the bombers on their way to Germany overhead. Then again the sirens and the silence. The silence drove away sleep, just the silence.

By now, there were also equally haunted streets in the former Jewish section of The Hague. What had happened to the people who had once lived there?

The absence of news from the deportees spurred fears that they had come to an untimely end. At Westerbork, where Dorrit's friend Gerda Buchsbaum was still incarcerated with other members of her family, there was now a clearer picture of what awaited them and their fellow prisoners once the doors of the cattle cars were opened at Auschwitz, thanks to the descriptive notes some deportees left behind and which were then sent back to Westerbork. The inmates now knew that there was a large chimney that belched a greyish smoke, according to the postwar memoir of Gerda's brother Norbert, Fotograaf Zonder Camera (Photographer without a Camera).

Still, as Greda's brother writes, the inmates had trouble putting it all together. Why, when the Germans had so many other things to be concerned about, would they be going to so much trouble and expense to exterminate the Jews? It couldn't be. It just didn't make sense.

In London, a similar attitude of denial prevailed amongst the Dutch government-in-exile, despite the increasingly disturbing reports about the camps in Germany and Poland (already well documented by Allied aerial reconnaissance). A year before, at the start of the transports, Prime Minister Gerbrandy had blasted the Germans 'satanic' plan for deporting Holland's Jews. However, as his aide Louis de Jong recounts, when presented with documentation indicating just how diabolical that plan was, the Dutchman became sceptical. Several months before, Gerald Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, had transmitted reports on the actual conditions of the camps. Additionally, De Jong had been informed by the Red Cross that his own father, mother and sister had been deported.

'I had but little hope that I would see them again, for I was one of the very few people in London who was convinced of the truth of what Riegner had reported,' De Jong, who would go on to publish the magisterial History of the Netherlands in the Second World War, told a Harvard audience forty-five years later.

The Dutch Prime Minister, to name one, was not. In November 1943, he asked me to accompany him for a weekend stay in a cottage outside London.

I put the Riegner papers in my bag. On the first evening, I said: 'Sir, I want you to read this.' He did. He looked at me in complete amazement. 'De Jong,' he said, 'do you believe this to be true?' I said: 'Yes.' Did I convince him? I am not entirely sure.

By way of showing why both Jews and Gentiles refused to believe such evidence of the genocide then already long under way, De Jong explained:

Everyone knew that human history had been scarred by endless cruelties. But that thousands, nay millions, of human beings - men, women and children, the old and the young, the healthy and the infirm - would be killed, finished off, mechanically, industrially, so to speak, would be exterminated like vermin

- that was a notion so alien to the human mind, an event so gruesome, so new, that the instincts, indeed the natural reaction of most people was: it can't be true.

Anne Frank believed it to be true. Another who believed the reports was Myrtil's brother, Julius. Still living in London, he had not heard from the Franks for four years, and had long since concluded that his brother, sister-in-law and two nieces had met a horrible fate at the hands of their former countrymen.

The Franks braced themselves for their second winter in hiding, busying themselves, finding solace in their routine chores. The numbing ritual of doing the laundry - I remember standing there with this plunger and doing the wash over and over in cold water, Sybil said - the sullen meals, the sudden, explosive fights all continued. So did the sewing bees.

In anticipation of the cold, the girls knitted sweaters, then unravelled them, then knitted them again.

They also continued to devour - and redevour - their small, motley and much-coveted library. While Dorrit read and reread the dog-eared copy of Gone With the Wind, Sybil devoted herself to her new passion: chemistry. The previous tenant Alfred Schnell, a former chemist, who was now in hiding with his wife near Zwolle with Annie's help, had left behind a number of his professional texts. For Sybil, with her propensity for "practical' subjects, the cache of chemistry books was a welcome diversion from life underground and a beacon of hope for a possible future as a chemist herself.

'I started worrying what I was going to be,' she said, 'and there were these books. We had no control over anything else but this was something that involved planning. This was the only part of my destiny I could control. I thought I wouldn't have a chance without a career.'

Lights-out for the Franks was generally about 8.30 p.m., or just before the citywide blackout. Occasionally, as they looked outside, they could see someone walking by with a torch with the mandated blue filter.

Then they went to bed.

Sometimes Sybil would take her manuals with her, reading the pages as best she could with a torch that she aimed through a small hole in her blanket. Dorrit tossed and turned, while her parents, who had long before the war stopped sharing a bed, fitfully became reacquainted with each other.

The front window of number 14 provided additional diversion as the war went on. The girls were under strict instructions not to touch the opaque muslin curtains, but after fifteen months of peering, they could see right through them.

No more than a hundred souls lived on the cobblestoned street and there was so little pedestrian traffic that seeing anything or anyone was an event.

We would memorise every mannerism of every person who passed by, Sybil recalled. We gave pretend names to them. One of our neigh-bours we called Slimmy, another Blond. Then there was the lady across the street who came with a bucket of water to clean the pavement. We used to be able to tell the time by her. Every Friday, come hell or high water, she would pitch the water out, like a good Dutchwoman, and then retreat into the house. This was a very big deal for us.?

Less diverting was the sight of the girl across the street and the disturbing company she kept.

We always saw her bringing home German soldiers,' said Dorrit.

Sometimes, she recalled, when the visitors were officers there would be a German staff car waiting outside. Evidently their neighbour was selective about the company she kept.

With food and necessities in increasingly short supply, there were many Dutchwomen who were willing to thus lend themselves to the occupiers for a night or more. Or perhaps the girl across the street was one of Mussert's followers, who believed - as the faux-Napoleon put it in a speech - 'that the Germanic tree [had] many branches. Neither Dorrit nor Sybil cared. They knew that that NSB woman, or whatever she was, was a danger.

Then, one day in December, the sisters looked out of their window

and saw snow. Another winter had come.

Collaborating with the Germans was becaming a dangerous business by

1943. The Dutch fascist Seyffardt was assassinated, followed by the NSB propaganda chief, H. Reydon. More garden-variety quislings were also gunned down. Among the more graphic images from the period is a police photo, dated 29 September 1943, showing one such turncoat, evidently surprised while he was bicycling, sprawled face down on a Benoordehout street, blood running from his head. Another, from March 1944, depicts an assassinated V-mann - as the Germans' Dutch undercover men were called - by the name of Peter Mansen lying on another Haagse street after a similar attack.

The reckoning was beginning.

The question of collaboration and retribution was increasingly on the mind of the Dutch government-in-exile, just as it was on the minds of the French, Norwegians, Belgians, Poles and Czechs.

Who exactly mas a collaborator? an article in The Times of 10 May 1944 asked. The newspaper divided collaborators into three types, similar to the basic distinctions the Dutch government would draw. 'Some civil servants, it pointed out, 'have collaborated with the occupying power for the good of the people. Those who helped enforce the country's rationing system, for example, fell into that category. But,' the correspondent continued, 'there have been weak men who went beyond what was neces-sary. And there have been collaborators who have given their wholehearted support to the enemy.'

Ultimately every occupied European country would define these categories differently. The Dutch government-in-exile, with its relish for organisation, set up a special postwar juridical authority in 1943, a full year before D-Day. The authority promised to be a harsh one; contrary to established Dutch practice, it was slated to include military officials.

A new set of laws was enacted for the prosecution of German high offi-cials, and those Dutchmen who fitted into the third, 'wholehearted' category of collaborators and could be adjudged as war criminals.

Thus at least a year before the three major Allied powers - the US, Great Britain and the Soviet Union - had laid the groundwork for the postwar crimes tribunal ultimately known as the Nuremberg trials, the Dutch had made preparations for their own private reckoning.

Nevertheless, the pool of Dutch fascists willing to give the occupying power their wholehearted support remained strong. In February 1944 the Germans established a new police academy in Schalkhaar in order to train a newly recruited, ideologically committed corps of Dutch policemen willing to fight for the new order in the Netherlands and combat the increasingly brazen but disorganised forces of the resistance.

In February, Heinrich Himmler made his second and last visit to Holland. One of the highlights of the SS Reichsführer's visit was his attendance at the inauguration of the new police academy. A photo of his visit shows him receiving the crisp salute of a group of newly minted Dutch police. Accompanying him are Rauter and Seyss-Inquart.

In 1942, The New York Times had prophesied that Himmler would become Holland's modern-day equivalent of the Duke of Alva, Philip I's cruel Dutch proconsol. Two years later, Himmler, and Rauter, his chief adjutant in Holland, had already fulfilled that bloody prophecy.

Thousands more Dutchmen had died, including both resistance fighters and innocent Dutch hostages, and tens of thousands of Dutch Jews had already been murdered or were soon to be in the SS extermination camps in the East. Himmler's name was now second only to Hitler's on the list of war criminals the Allies had already drawn up.

Nevertheless, to judge from Himmler's confident look in the photograph, the year could still be 1942. Only the careworn expression of Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart, exhausted and preoccupied with worries about the now imminent Allied invasion, indicates that the photograph was taken in 1944.

Several weeks later, in March, Seyss-Inquart gave his blessing to yet another new Dutch Nazi grouping, the Landwacht, a group of homegrown Nazis who, with no formal training, agreed to act as an auxiliary police force. Committed to act against their countrymen as the eyes, ears, legs and arms of the Germans, this untrained but enthusiastic group of uniformed hooligans was responsible for numerous atrocities during the last two years of the war. In the last phase of the onderduiker war the Landwacht also helped out with the large-scale manhunt that Rauter launched later in the year in the onderduikersparadijs - underground paradise - which was reputed to exist in the Noordoostpolder. This was the same polder that Dorrit had gazed out on en route to visit Edgar in Westerbork two years before. Scores of divers, including Jewish divers, were successfully flushed out.

The trains from Westerbork continued to run. On 3 March, a trainload of 240 was sent to Auschwitz and immediately dispatched. On 23 March, the next train, with 599, was sent to Bergen-Belsen. In March 1944, Rauter proudly informed Himmler that 'in ten days' time the last pure Jew will be sent East from Westerbork'. As far as the Jews of Holland were concerned, the SS had met its objective, or very nearly so.

That just left the onderduikers. Bounties were raised in order to assist the searchers. Earlier, after the first great wave of onderduikers dived under, a worthwhile tip phoned into the local Gestapo headquarters might net the successful informer five guilders; now, in 1944, a productive lead was worth as much as seventy-five guilders, no mean sum in poverty-stricken Holland. For a few enterprising, cold-blooded types - including one Jewish woman in Amsterdam who gave up several dozen of her fellow Jews - collecting bounties became a lucrative business.

On Sunday 5 March 1944, the Franks spent their six hundredth day in hiding.

They had many more to go.