Description
Book SynopsisThe extraordinary, never-before-told story of Bep Voskuijl, Anne Frank’s closest friend during the 761 days she spent in the Secret Annex. Bep was just twenty-three when the Franks went into hiding and she risked her life to protect them, plunging into Amsterdam’s black market under the noses of German soldiers and Dutch spies to source food and medicine for the Annex. In those cramped quarters, Bep and Anne’s friendship blossomed. As this book reveals, while she was sharing meals with Anne Frank, Bep’s sister Nelly – whose name was scrubbed from Anne’s published diary – was collaborating with the Nazis.
Written by Bep’s own son, The Last Secret of the Secret Annex interweaves her story with Anne Frank’s and Nelly’s to show us the Secret Annex as we’ve never seen it before. We follow Bep after the war as she struggles to build a life in the shadow of her past, unable to get ove
Trade Review‘
Fascinating . . . not only conveys the
quiet heroism of what his mother contributed to Anne Frank’s story, but
a sad playing-out of a family’s dysfunction, of the pain of survival, of the ripples of trauma flowing into succeeding generations’ * Daily Telegraph *
'
Devastating, compelling' * Daily Mail *
‘This
gripping account adds a missing human dimension to the story of the young girl hidden in an attic during the Nazi occupation of Holland—and those who helped and those who betrayed her.
I read it in one gulp—as will you’ -- Kati Marton, author of 'The Chancellor'
‘As much a work of painful family therapy as painstaking historical analysis . . . A
riveting read’ -- Peter Hayes, author of 'Why? Explaining the Holocaust'
'A
superbly well-written, intimate, engrossing, and heartrending reckoning with the endless damage done by genocide' * Booklist (Starred) *
‘An important contribution to the literature on Anne Frank’ * Kirkus *
‘For long, the story of Bep Voskuijl, one of Anne Frank’s courageous helpers, has been mostly kept in the dark.
This captivating book tells her moving and tragic story, her wartime assistance in the Secret Annex, and the long shadows of the war on her life and her family’s’ -- Dr Bart Wallet, professor of early modern and modern Jewish history at the University of Amsterdam
‘
Part biography and part whodunit, The Last Secret of the Secret Annex is, above all, a bereaved son’s
cri de coeur,
simultaneously mourning and celebrating the mother he lost even before she died’ * Wall Street Journal *
‘This
powerful story brings to life Bep’s heroism and illuminates generations of a Dutch family, its secrets, and the trauma the Nazi occupation bequeathed to the future’ -- Pamela S. Nadell, author of 'America’s Jewish Women'
‘Provides a
poignant account of the poison left by Dutch collaboration . . . [and] the
devastating effect that Bep’s lifelong secretiveness had on her family. It is for their own stories that these books should be read, not for the extraordinary fame of Anne Frank’
* TLS *
