Second paragraph of third section (English only, I don’t have access to the Dutch original):
‘I want to know all about it. I want to learn who they were, the nobodies who no one was ever interested in. I want to find out how he was as a person, whether he hated, whether he loved, what his weaknesses and his strength [sic] were. I want to learn to understand that person, who, like so many others, was exterminated as a nobody?’ She looks surprised. Suddenly she gets up. Her hands come to life in the overfull secretary [sic]. Documents, photographs, letters, it is all mixed up but she blindly finds what she is looking for and sits next to me with her small collection.
This is the story of Fritz Pfeffer, known to the world as Dussel the dentist, who shared a bedroom in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam with the diarist Anne Frank for twenty uncomfortable months from November 1942 until they were arrested in July 1944 and sent to their deaths. (Fritz Pfeffer died in Neuengamme that December, Anne Frank in Belsen probably in February 1945.) I have written before about the editing of Anne’s original words about him, here and here; I think even her biggest fans (and I count myself as quite a big fan) would need to admit that her writing about him does not show her at her best, and it’s actually rather redeeming to read about him in his own terms.
Fritz Pfeffer was from Gießen in Hesse (all eight of the fugitives in the Achterhuis were born in Germany, including both Frank girls). He was born in 1889, moved to Berlin in 1912 and opened a dental surgery there, served in the First World War, married in 1926, had a son in 1927 and divorced in 1932. He met Charlotte Kaletta (1910-1985) in 1936; she too was divorced, with a son, and although her background was Christian, her ex-husband and therefore her son counted as Jewish.
They fled together to Amsterdam after Kristallnacht in 1938, and Fritz’s son went to his brother in England and survived the war. A twist of Dutch law meant that Fritz and Charlotte could not marry; as they were German citizens, the Netherlands was not willing to let them break German law. She did marry him retroactively in 1950, with effect from 1937, but of course he had been dead for several years by then. Fritz’s mother had died in 1925, but his father and both his sisters, and Charlotte’s ex-husband and her son, all died in the Holocaust as well. It’s another grim story among so many millions.
I really hate to say it, but this is actually a terrible book. Nanda van der Zee, one of the Netherlands’ most controversial historians, decided to write it not as non-fiction but as a fictional interview with Charlotte (who had died two years before the Anne Frank House researchers came across the papers, so van der Zee never actually met her). We therefore don’t know what details are true and what are van der Zee’s creative licence. On top of that, the English translation of van der Zee’s original Dutch text, and of Fritz’s own letters to Charlotte in German, is clunky and tin-eared. We do at least get the original German text of those letters, so if you have the linguistic skills (or access to a translation engine) you can draw your own conclusions. Fritz’s German was awkward but fluent, like most repressed professional men of his time. (Anne mercilessly mocks his Dutch in the Diary.)
At the end of the book, van der Zee gives her fictional version of Charlotte a peroration about the evil of war, but this rather misses the point (though let me be clear that war usually is evil): it was not war that killed Fritz Pfeffer, Anne Frank and five of their six companions – it was the rulers of the country where they were born, declaring that they were not fully human and that they deserved only death. While the war certainly did not help, it was another result of Fascism, which was the ultimate cause of both the war and the genocide. It seems to me very strange that van der Zee chose to take a different, and demonstrably wrong, line.
On the positive side, a bunch of photos are included, mainly from Fritz’s earlier life but a few from Charlotte’s. There is one picture, and only one, of the two of them together, on a boat probably in the Netherlands in 1939 or 1940. She looks blissful; he looks pretty content too, and has a good cigar slipped between his fingers. From the number of clothes they are wearing, it was a cold day though a sunny one; they must have provided their own warmth for each other.
It is awful to think of Charlotte living another four decades, knowing that the man she loved had spent his last year and a half in the Netherlands sharing uncomfortable space with a resentful teenager – whose side of the story then became world famous, to the extent that a comic actor got an Oscar nomination for playing him for laughs in the film. She had at least had regular letters from Fritz during his time in the Achterhuis, but sadly they have not survived. I am glad that we now have some access to Fritz’s past, though it could really have been presented much much better than it is in this book.
I found this cheap and remaindered at a book fair, and I can’t find anywhere on the Internet that is actually selling copies of the English translation. If you really want to look for it, the ISBN is 905911096X. The Dutch original is also out of print (and is not cited as a source by the Anne Frank House) but you may be able to get it here.
This was the shortest book on my unread shelves acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells.
