Patrick Moreau is a professor of literature in Montreal, editor-in-chief of the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and contributed to the collective work edited by R. Antonius and N. Baillargeon, Identity, “race”, freedom of expression.
The case had the honors of the television news and made the front page of many daily newspapers around the world: we would have finally identified the one who revealed to the German police the hiding place where Anne Frank and her family were hiding.
Highly publicized, this information should however have aroused a certain restraint. First of all, because this “revelation” has all of the warmed up history. The anonymous letter received after the war by the father of Anne Frank and accusing the Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh of having denounced them had been given to Dutch police investigators as early as 1964. Then, because the main investigator himself , retired FBI agent Vince Pankoke, agrees that the charges against this character are not a matter of certainty and are only “the most likely scenario”.
Unfortunately, not all the newspapers and television channels that reported this affair had this kind of caution and, from the use of the conditional or the indication that it was only a hypothesis, we quickly passed in some of them to sensational headlines like: “Name of betrayer of Anne Frank finally revealed!” It is true that, due to speed and competition, the media no longer cultivate nuance, even if it means sometimes taking their ease with the truth.
However, the place given to this information is not only linked to its sensationalism, it also reveals our almost mystical belief in the benefits of technology, as well as the submission of our collective imagination to the codes of storytelling Hollywood. Most of the reports on this investigation led by ex-agent Pankoke insisted on the fact that in addition to mobilizing some thirty experts, it was based on the most recent and most efficient means: intelligence artificial and big data especially. Wouldn’t it be disappointing if the use of all these high-tech tools led to only one hypothesis, barely more plausible than another? In our favorite films and series, the culprit never escapes justice for good.
Hateful culprits
Beyond this role of cinematographic and technophile mythology, the success of this kind of revelations is also linked to a kind of recent change in collective morality: we now need culprits for everything, preferably clearly identifiable, hateful to wish. As soon as an evil is recognized, one or more persons responsible must be immediately designated. We no longer believe in accidents, coincidences, tragedy, fatality. Does this make us more cautious or more lucid? This is another question, which I will leave open here.
In this specific case, even if Arnold van den Bergh would indeed be responsible for this denunciation of the place where the Frank family was hiding, to designate him as the “traitor” remains moreover more problematic than it seems. This indictment of the Jewish notary takes no account of the context in which these events took place. The hypothesis of the team gathered around Vince Pankoke is that this notable, a member of the Jewish Council set up in Amsterdam by the Nazis, would have denounced the Franks in order to save his own family from deportation. Will we throw stones at him? Very clever who, among us, could say how he would have acted in the same circumstances! It is easy to be virtuous sitting in an armchair; but who knows if we wouldn’t have made the same choice as him and denounced foreigners to save our loved ones? The real culprits for the death of Anne Frank and most of her family members (only her father survived deportation) were the Nazis who persecuted, hunted down, deported and exterminated millions of European Jews. To judge otherwise, to condemn after the fact those who have not been able to show themselves heroic is a little easy, and above all: outraged virtue often has something inhuman about it.
Not to mention that accusing a dead person and smearing his name without the slightest formal proof, shouldn’t that cause us some discomfort? Someone will perhaps retort that we owe the truth at least to the victims; Which is not wrong. But it may also well be that Anne Frank herself does not see things that way. After all, his father, Otto, received this anonymous letter upon his return from Auschwitz, which now incriminates Arnold van den Bergh, and he waited nearly twenty years before revealing its existence. We are told today that it was probably so as not to cast opprobrium on a Jew in the aftermath of the Holocaust, or else because this man, who died shortly after the war, in 1950, had children to whom Otto Frank did not wish to inflict the slightest harm. It’s possible. But perhaps he also thought that an anonymous denunciation did not constitute very credible proof and that it weighed no more heavily in the balance than a man’s honor.