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| Rosemary Sullivan |
Rosemary Sullivan is a terrific nonfiction writer; indeed, a jury I was part of once gave her a Governor General's Literary Award in Nonfiction for her biography of the poet Gwendolyn MacEwan. In recent years she has moved her scope well beyond Canada to Europe and particularly moments of the Second World War.
So I'm sure her book The Betrayal of Anne Frank will be well written and deeply thought out. But it may be getting a rough ride from historians of Second World War holocaust matters.
It's a hybrid book, it seems. The book is by Sullivan, who is a former English prof and author of several literary biographies, but the research she writes about -- into who might have sent the Germans into the hiding place of the Frank family in 1944 -- was organized by a media producer and run by a retired FBI officer and a cold-case team of a dozen crime investigators.
Laurien Vastenhout, a researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, says she is concerned about errors and misunderstandings in the book. And Emile Schrijver, the director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, has historically-rooted reservations about the study's conclusions. He said, according to the New York Times:
he did not doubt the good intentions of the team. “In a book like this, after so many years of work, I would have expected some sort of critical reflection about what this teaches us about betrayal,” he said. “There’s a total lack of historical thinking and context that really bothers me. And that’s the big difference between forensic and historical research.”
Update, January 29: Allan Levine has a substantial article in today's Globe and Mail, better sourced and with much more context, and reinforcing the doubts expressed above about the persuasiveness of this investigation's conclusions.
