That is all one needs to write, and already the reader knows who was hiding in the attic and the fate about to befall them. We know it more than sixty years later, at a historical moment when it is often noted how little history we remember. We know the reason why we know, but it bears repeating lest we take it for granted that we know because a little girl kept a diary. Of all the roundups, the deportations, the murders committed during that time, this arrest is the one that has been investigated most closely, the one about which memories have been most thoroughly searched. It is the one we know about, if we know about any at all. The car arrived without sirens, without haste. Upstairs in the attic, Otto Frank was correcting Peter van Pels’s English dictation. No one in the office below was alarmed by the appearance of the car until a fat man appeared, and, speaking in Dutch, ordered everyone to be quiet. One of the men who got out of the car wore the uniform of a sergeant in the Jewish Affairs Section of the Gestapo in Holland.
