Much has been written about Anne Frank’s life, but the story of her friend Bep Voskuijl has remained untold – until now.
As the youngest of the five Dutch people who hid the Frank family, Bep Voskuijl was Anne’s closest confidante during the 761 excruciating days she spent hidden in the Secret Annex. In those cramped quarters, through daily meals and deep conservations, Bep and Anne’s friendship bloomed.
Written by her own son, The Last Secret of the Secret Annex intertwines the story of Bep and her sister Nelly Voskuijl with Anne Frank’s. Nelly’s name may have been scrubbed from Anne’s published diary, but Joop van Wijk-Voskuijl and Jeroen de Bruyn expose the secrets of her past. While most books about the Holocaust focus on Jewish victims and Nazi persecutors, this story is about those caught in between, the moral ambiguities and hard choices faced by ordinary families like the Voskuijls, in which collaborators and resisters often lived under the same roof. The book provides a powerful understanding of how historical trauma is inherited from one generation to the next and how sometimes keeping a secret hurts far more than revealing a shameful truth.
Beautifully written and unsettlingly suspenseful, The Last Secret of the Secret Annex will show us the Secret Annex as we’ve never seen it before.
