O pinion
My Cousin May Have Betrayed Anne Frank. What Would I
Have Done in His Place?
BY JASON VAN LEEUWEN
MY ENTIRE ADULT life I
have espoused and jettisoned
multiple theologies and philos-
ophies after subjecting them
to the ultimate test: Would
they survive Auschwitz?
Sometimes yes, sometimes
no, almost always with some
kind of caveat. Now Auschwitz
presents a new test much closer
to home.

This month, the subject
of who betrayed Anne Frank
and her family has exploded
onto the airwaves. A new
book, prominently featured on
“60 Minutes,” claims that the
Franks were betrayed by Arnold
van den Bergh, a member of
the Joodse Raad, or the Jewish
Council of the Netherlands.

Van den Bergh was a scion
of the Dutch-Jewish family
that patented margarine and
helped found the conglomerate
Unilever. He was also my cousin.

Anne Frank and her
family, including Otto Frank,
were Jewish refugees from
Germany who went into
hiding in Amsterdam during
the Holocaust. They were
discovered after two years and
sent to concentration camps.

Anne Frank and her sister
died, probably of typhus, in
Bergen-Belsen, where my
grandfather also was sent and
also contracted typhus but
survived. Among the Franks,
only Otto survived.

My father is the son of Henri
(Opa) and Eva (Oma) van
14 FEBRUARY 17, 2022
Leeuwen. Opa owned a casings
factory in Holland, and Oma
was the daughter of Nathan
and Rosetta van Zwanenberg
(née van den Bergh). Rosetta
was the first cousin of Arnold
van den Bergh. The allegations
against Arnold and the story
of my grandfather is a study in
contrasts. Opa is a hero to us, his
descendants. After failing to
get a visa to join his wife and
children on the last boat out
of Holland prior to the Nazi
invasion, he forced himself
into the Heineken Brewery
and hid there as Nazis leveled
Rotterdam. He was able to gain
a fake identity and posed as a
Protestant minister in order to
pass notes to and from impris-
oned members of the Dutch
resistance. He was arrested
and sent to Westerbork (a
transit camp ironically built
as a haven for German Jewish
refugees prior to the invasion),
then to Bergen-Belsen, where
he miraculously survived. He
died when I was eight.

My grandfather, unlike
most others in the world,
believed early on that Hitler
meant business. Before the
war, he published and wrote
for a small publication aimed
at his fellow Jews. In the 1930s
he helped convince scores of
German Jews to leave Germany
while they could. He estab-
lished the Dutch-based Jewish
Colonization Society (with
generous contributions from
his in-laws) and went to the
infamous Evian Conference in
1938, managing to convince a
few delegates to work with him
in resettling Jewish refugees.

He laid his own life on the
line when a guard in Bergen-
Belsen discovered a Hebrew
Bible belonging to a child in
his barracks. Opa lied and said
it belonged to him. For some
reason, the officer opened the
Bible, recited the first verse in
perfect Hebrew, handed it back
to him and walked away.

Oma’s cousin Arnold
survived in another way. A
prominent philanthropist,
he was among the original
members of the Joodse Raad,
convened by the occupying Nazi
forces and its puppet govern-
ment. Its raison d’être was to
communicate and implement
all laws and decrees impinging
on the Jewish community.

Like similar councils set
up across Europe, the Joodse
Raad determined that things
would go better for the Jewish
community if they accom-
modated these decrees and
did not resist them. They did
manage to get permission to
“hire” thousands of people,
which initially shielded them
from deportation, but they also
helped to implement depor-
tation orders and in some
cases even determined which
Jews would be deported and
which would be spared. Their
strategy turned out to be a
tragic miscalculation of epic
proportions. Around 75% of
Jews in Holland, including
some German refugees, ended
up being murdered anyway.

The evidence against van
den Bergh appears to be a letter
sent anonymously in 1945
to Otto Frank, Anne’s father,
claiming van den Bergh shared
the family’s hiding place with
the Nazi-run Central Agency
for Jewish Emigration in
Amsterdam. Van den Bergh was
able to escape deportation, going
into hiding until after the war.

Dutch Jews still seethe
when the topic of the Joodse
Raad comes up. Hindsight is,
of course, 20-20, but when
Eichmann himself is quoted
praising the remarkable
efficiency with which Dutch
Jews were being liquidated,
you know you’ve got a serious
problem. Many others come to
the council’s, and to van den
JEWISH EXPONENT
Bergh’s, defense, saying that
no one can judge the choices
Jews and non-Jews made under
great duress.

This inner conflict used to
be abstract for me, but now it’s
quite personal.

With respect to my cousin
Arnold, the debate on social
media and among Holocaust
scholars has been quite fierce.

Some say the coverage of the
book is motivated by a desire
to place more blame for the
Holocaust on Jews and less on
Nazis and their non-Jewish
collaborators. Dutch Jewish
scholars have called the report
“rubbish” and “slander.”
Others say the report is quite
credible. The Anne Frank
Huis, the museum inhabiting
the building Otto Frank once
owned and where his family
hid, has charted a middle
path, praising the investiga-
tors for coming up with new
evidence and calling for more
investigation. After doing many hours of
my own research, and with
gratitude to a Jewish genealogy
Facebook page for providing
ample documentation, I have
come to a conclusion: There is
no conclusion.

I have much less confi-
dence than the investigators
that there is a smoking gun.

We have no evidence that van
den Bergh was able to trade
information in order to stave
off deportation; indeed, many
in his extended family were
murdered by the Nazis, as were
most members of the council.

He may simply have been able
to bribe a few key people and go
into hiding without betraying
anyone. However, the Joodse Raad
did have information on
addresses where Jews were
hiding, as they were known
to pass along letters to them.

Van den Bergh is likely to have
knowledge of some or more
of them. Also, at least two
members of that council were
not sent to Auschwitz, but rather
to places like Theresienstadt
and Bergen-Belsen, which
were not extermination camps
(cold comfort). The investiga-
tors assert that van den Bergh
not only was not deported,
but rather he lived “openly”
in Amsterdam — though I’ve
found nothing corroborating
this. And then, of course,
there’s that anonymous letter.

I have always tried to
model myself after Opa, the
fundraiser-diplomat-fighter who embodied Hillel’s dictum:
“In a place where there is not a
mensch, strive to be a mensch.”
But now I learn that other
members of my family chose
a different course — one of
accommodation, not defiance.

Whether or not he betrayed
the Franks, van den Bergh
belonged to a council that
helped the Nazis control the
Jews. Did he go along to save
as many Jews as he could, or
to save himself? Certainly
the Nazis knew they were
presenting Jewish leaders with
an impossible choice.

Although I am in no
position to judge them for their
behavior, I am left wondering:
what would I do? Would I be
Opa or Cousin Arnold? The
truth is, unless one has person-
ally traversed the crucible of
the Holocaust, one cannot
possibly know.

I remember something Opa
once said: The only ones in
the camps he could trust were
the criminals and common
thieves. I know for a fact that
is not true, because everybody
in the camps also trusted Opa.

And so do I. l
Jason van Leeuwen is a rabbi and
cantor who serves as spiritual
leader of Temple B’nai Hayim in Los
Angeles. He is also a chaplain and
composer. JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



O PINION
Condemning That Flawed Amnesty International Report
Doesn’t Bring Israel Any Closer to Peace
BY MATT NOSANCHUK
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
released a 280-page report on
Feb. 1 calling Israel an apart-
heid state and charging it
with crimes against humanity,
including atrocities against
Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Such claims have been made
before, usually over vociferous
objections from supporters of
Israel. Predictably, the report
unleashed harsh criticism
from the Israeli government
and from voices throughout
the American Jewish commu-
nity. Much of the criticism,
including the statement issued
from my organization, the New
York Jewish Agenda, focused
on the report’s language,
terminology, omissions and
conclusions, which called into
question Israel’s very legiti-
macy as a homeland for the
Jewish people.

For example, as we noted
in our statement, Amnesty
Internationa l ’s
report concludes that Israel has
employed a system of apart-
heid within its borders since
the nation was established in
1948. As an American Jewish
organization uniting liberal
Zionists who are passionate
about Israel and hold a deep
commitment to promoting
their Jewish values here at
home and in Israel, we share
the anger of many in the
Jewish community regarding
the excesses of the report,
especially during this time
of growing concerns about
the rise of antisemitism and
authoritarianism in the United
States and around the world.

At the same time, we believe
in the necessity of a more
nuanced response beyond that
anger. We must look beyond this
report’s controversial legal
conclusions and examine the
diffi cult realities of Israel’s
55-year occupation of the West
Bank, its control of the Gaza
border, and the unfulfi lled
promise of full equality for
Palestinian citizens of Israel. It’s
not just Amnesty International
that has documented this in
detail: Numerous Israeli NGOs
and the U.S. State Department
have warned about the many
costs of occupation. Th ese
realities cannot be ignored —
not by those who live in Israel,
nor by those of us who support
Israel here in America.

I have traveled to Israel
numerous times over the past
46 years, including spending
a year there during college.

I have seen fi rst-hand the
harsh realities of the occupa-
tion and felt the dream of a
peacefully shared society
for Palestinian and Jewish
citizens of Israel slipping
away. I have also observed
STATEMENT FROM THE PUBLISHER
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how the lack of Palestinian
equality corrodes Jewish
Israeli ideals of a democratic,
just, and secure state. Like so
many others, especially many
younger American Jews, I fi nd
it increasingly diffi cult to see
those ideals in the current state
of Israel.

What matters most are the
realities of life on the ground
for Jews and Palestinians, not
the labels — however contro-
versial — that one puts on them.

Th e categoric condemnation
of the Amnesty International
report by many in our commu-
nity avoids grappling with the
ongoing control and denial
of rights that Palestinians in
the occupied territories and
(to a lesser degree) in Israel
experience day in and day out.

This unsupportable reality
— with no moral, logical or
politically feasible endgame —
must change. It threatens to
bring about the end, one way
or another, of a democratic
homeland for Jews.

In just the past few
weeks, Palestinian families
were forcibly evicted from
their homes in the Sheikh
Jarrah neighborhood of East
Jerusalem. An 80-year-old
Palestinian-American man,
Omar Assad, died of a heart
attack aft er being detained,
handcuff ed, blindfolded and
abandoned in the cold by
soldiers who apparently had
no good reason to detain him.

Th is ongoing Israeli coalition
debate over the construction of
a yeshiva in Evyatar, an illegal
West Bank outpost, demon-
strates the continued push
by the settlement movement
to take over more land in the
West Bank and the apparent
unwillingness of the govern-
ment decision-makers to stop
them. For each one of these
examples, supporters of Israel
invoke others in which Israelis
JEWISH EXPONENT
were targeted by Palestinians.

They all become part of
competing and irreconcilable
narratives on both sides of the
confl ict. We can continue down
the rabbit hole of one-sided
recriminations — with no good
end in sight — that has defi ned
this decades-long confl ict. Or
we can focus our energies on
supporting eff orts to build a
better future for Palestinians
and Israelis alike.

Imagine if those of us who
care deeply about safeguarding
a democratic homeland for
Jews in Israel expended as
much eff ort fi ghting for greater
justice in Israel and an end to
the occupation as we spend
responding each time someone
condemns Israel: We could
help make a real diff erence in
transforming the situation.

We must stop allowing outside
critics to defi ne the conversa-
tion and limit our voices.

While a just, negotiated
two-state solution to the
confl ict feels remote at this
time, we don’t need to limit
our activism and voices to
defending Israel in the face
of harsh criticism. Many Jews
and Arabs, Palestinians and
Israelis — with support from
many American Jewish organi-
zations — work together every
day to build trust and seek
consensus around common
issues. In our increasingly polar-
ized and siloed world, we too
oft en hear only voices with
which we agree and ignore or
condemn the rest. It does not
have to be this way. We know
many in the New York and
American Jewish communities
share our feelings about the
confl ict.

Like them, we remain
committed to standing up
for our values. Th is requires
acknowledging that there are
diffi cult realities on both sides.

We can wait for the next report
and the ensuing round of
statements and recriminations,
or we can raise our voices in
support of building bridges of
understanding and a shared
society. Th e choice is ours to
make. ●
Matt Nosanchuk is a lawyer and
the president and co-founder of
the New York Jewish Agenda.

He served as the liaison to the
American Jewish community in the
White House during the Obama-
Biden Administration.

Be heard.

Email your letters
to the editor.

letters@jewishexponent.com FEBRUARY 17, 2022
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