After The Annex
When Anne Frank’s father, Otto, returned to Amsterdam from Auschwitz, he sought to uncover what had happened to his wife and two daughters, the Van Pels family and dentist Fritz Pfeffer – the seven companions with whom he had spent two years in hiding before their arrest by the Gestapo. He awaited their return at the train station each day, photographs of them in hand. Tragically, after piecing together the stories of the few eyewitnesses he found, he would be forced to conclude that he alone had survived the Nazi death camps. Seventy-five years later, 'After the Annex' takes up Otto Frank’s project and carefully reconstructs each of their camp experiences in the final days of the Holocaust.
On the last page of what might be the best-known war story in all of Western history, Anne Frank and the seven protagonists of her diary joined the faceless mass of Holocaust victims whose individual fates, experiences and memories remain largely unknown. In this first systematic and comprehensive historical account of its kind, author Bas von Benda-Beckmann turns to the wide array of sources available to historians today to restore to each their individuality. Starting with their lives before the war, he retraces their journey from their detainment in Amsterdam to Dutch transit camp Westerbork, at which point their paths diverge as they are deported and transferred between Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, Raguhn, Melk and Neuengamme. He meticulously reconstructs their experiences of forced labour, factory work, disease, hunger, violence, freezing temperatures and death marches.
While many records are still missing, and in many cases were actively destroyed by the Nazis, Von Beckmann makes use of countless eye-witness accounts from people who had been in the same camps at the same time in order to paint a picture of the conditions they would have been subjected to. Such a process is not without its historiographical challenges, which the author addresses, just as he makes new discoveries about their individual fates and interactions in the camps. Von Benda-Beckmann also situates these experiences within a larger historical context and the Nazis’ developing approach to the systematic extermination of European Jewish people.
This is a heart-wrenching and detailed historical account, written in a highly readable and evocative style. The many photographs of documents and details that have been included help bring this disturbing chapter of history to life, taking us the closest yet to the tragedy of these eight individuals.
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A Tablecloth for Hitler
Growing up in a German-Dutch family, historian Bas von Benda-Beckmann developed a particular interest in the Second World War. His grandmother’s sister had been married to Hitler’s most trusted general Alfred Jodl, who was hanged for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials. Another sister, meanwhile, had turned away from Nazism when she fell in love with a half-Jewish doctor, and personally knew those involved in Hitler’s failed assassination attempt in 1944.
Alma's Daughters - Five Lives in the Shadowsd
In this innovative multi-biography, Jutta Chorus follows a fascinating female family line over the course of the past century and a half. The book begins in the nineteenth century with matriarch Alma and then follows the lives of Alma’s daughter Elly, her granddaughters Sylvia and Elly, and her great-granddaughter Lili. A writer, an agricultural scientist, a journalist, a photographer and a filmmaker. Had they been men, the biographer argues, they would have displayed their talents with more bravado and most likely gone down in history.
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When Humans Stray — Seven Animals Bite Back
For 400 years, European seafarers attempted to sail over the top of the globe for a shorter trading route. The famous polar explorer William Barentsz, who lent his name to the Barents Sea, died a hero, after becoming stranded in Novaya Zemlya in northern Russia. Today, however, he would have been able to complete his route in the summer.
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Uprising — The Populist Revolt and Battle for the Soul of the West
In recent years the far-right’s growing mainstream acceptance has come to feel unstoppable. On a platform of identity, family, nationalism and anti-immigration, populist parties have seen electoral wins throughout the West. Underlying their valorisation of what is ‘natural’ and ‘realistic’, however, is a broader counterrevolutionary movement against the left-liberal globalist elite and what is perceived as the undermining of Western identity.
