Despite his full schedule, he always made time to see us and to check in on my mother. He cared deeply for the Voskuijl family. One of the first things he did upon his return from Auschwitz was visit my dying grandfather Johan at home, something that he had not been able to do while in hiding. A year later, at my parents’ wedding in Amsterdam in May 1946, Otto was the one who gave away the bride. I sometimes get choked up just thinking about this fact. It had been only one year since he returned from the camps, one year since he learned that he had lost his entire family. And yet there he was, forcing a smile while posing for pictures with my mother in her wedding dress outside the municipal building in Amsterdam. How must it have felt to be him in that moment, standing in as the father of the bride, knowing full well that his two girls, Anne and Margot, would never have weddings of their own?
On that day on the beach, Otto could tell something was wrong with my mother immediately after we sat down. He took her by the hand and listened quietly. She was whispering to him. I’m not sure exactly what was said. I remember that she mentioned her sister’s name, Nelly—but not much else. I left at one point to go to the bathroom. When I came back to the terrace, I saw that my mother was crying. Otto decided that I shouldn’t be there; perhaps he didn’t want me to hear what was being said, or perhaps he just wanted to give her some space.
He motioned for my mother to stop speaking. Then he gave me some money as a gift for my birthday, which was coming up in September. I happily ran off along the boardwalk to buy myself a present. It didn’t take me long to pick something out: a large kite called Groene Valk (Green Falcon).
Later that afternoon, Uncle Otto showed me how to fly the kite. By that point, we had moved to the beach. My mother was relaxing in a lounge chair, watching us play. I could see why she confided in Otto—he was so gentle and patient that I felt he would understand almost anything. I asked him why it was that my mother always cried around him. He smiled. “Because she loves my family and me,” he said. Then he told me to run off and play with my present and returned to my mother’s side.
I know the Secret Annex was the root of my mother’s pain, but I think her problems with my father, Cor van Wijk, only made things worse. Their marriage had started out strong, but cracks had emerged in the late 1940s, and as the relationship deteriorated, my mother retreated deeper into herself. At some point in the 1950s, she began to investigate her trauma, writing long letters to Otto and Miep, trying to make sense of what had happened so that she could move on. But it never worked.
“I’m stuck again,” she’d sometimes say to me.
I think what she meant was that she was back in the Annex. I couldn’t understand then what tortured her so. Of course, it was tragic, what happened to Anne and the others, yet what more could she have done? Couldn’t she give herself a break? Couldn’t she be proud that she had managed to hold on to some of her humanity, that she had been brave in the face of such barbarism?
Although she sometimes let slip that she and the other helpers had “failed” in their efforts to keep the Annex a secret, no one faulted her for what had happened, for how it had ended. To the contrary, the world seemed poised to celebrate her, if only she’d allow it.
“Why are you always so sad when you go back in your mind to that time?” I asked her when I was only 10 years old. “It’s just beautiful what you’ve done.”
My mother started sobbing. “My dear boy…that grief will never leave my heart.”
Around this time, I noticed that my mother would often sob quietly in the mornings while sitting at her writing desk in the living room. As the weeks passed and she grew more hopeless and forlorn, I began to watch over her, to worry about what she might do. One Friday morning in the winter of 1959, we were home alone together. My father had gone to work early, and my brothers had already left for school. I thought I heard the same soft sobs coming from my mother’s bedroom. I tried to ignore them—I’m sad to say that they were becoming rather routine at that point—but soon the sobs were replaced by a plaintive moaning that sounded almost as though she was in physical pain. I ran toward her bedroom, but she was not there. Next, I checked our small bathroom.
She was sitting on the edge of the bath, in front of the sink, and weeping. Her mouth was filled with small white sleeping pills. I lifted her up without thinking. All I knew was that I had to get those pills out. I slapped them out of her mouth. Many of them ended up in the sink, but I couldn’t get them all out of her mouth, so I stuck my finger down her throat, making her retch. Afterward, I helped her back to the side of the bath, where we cried together for a long time. Then she stumbled to her bed. All she said to me was, “Don’t tell your father or your brothers.”
I must not have gotten all the pills out of her mouth, because she quickly slipped into a sleep so deep that I could hardly see her breathing. I skipped school and stayed by her side all day. She was still sleeping when my father arrived in the evening, expecting dinner. I told him that she had had another migraine and had gone to bed early. I tried to put on a brave face, to act as though everything was normal, but inwardly, I was still crying, terrified that she would never wake up.
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