Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl was one of the people who helped to hide Anne Frank and the other people of the Secret Annex in Amsterdam. He was the father of helper Bep Voskuijl, who is known as "Elli Vossen" in the earliest editions of The Diary of Anne Frank. Voskuijl built the famous bookcase that covered the hiding place.
Helper in the Secret Annex
Voskuijl and his wife Christina Sodenkamp had eight children, one of whom was Bep Voskuijl. He worked as the manager of the warehouses of the Opekta company at 263 Prinsengracht, administrated by Otto Frank. In July 1942, Frank went into hiding in the same building, together with his wife Edith Holländer and his daughters Margot and Anne, later accompanied by the Van Pels family and dentist Fritz Pfeffer. After his daughter Bep, who worked at the Opekta office, Voskuijl was let in on the secret, too. The other warehouse employees were not aware of the people in hiding. Voskuijl and his daughter supported each other tremendously in these years. They could only discuss the Annex with each other, as they kept silent to the rest of the Voskuijl family for safety reasons. In her diary, Anne Frank wrote that Voskuijl "couldn't do enough to help". For the hiders, it was a great reassurance knowing he would keep an eye on the situation in the warehouse. Johan would also make sure that the waste from the hiding place disappeared unnoticed in the morning. Furthermore, in August 1942, Voskuijl built the famous bookcase that concealed the entrance to the Secret Annex. He also made Saint Nicholas gifts for the people in hiding, such as an ashtray for Hermann van Pels and bookends for Otto Frank. Anne was filled with admiration: "How anyone is able to make things so well with his hands is a mystery to me!"
Illness
The people in hiding felt a great loss when Voskuijl had to stop working in the summer of 1943, as he suffered from stomach cancer. On 15 June 1943, Anne Frank wrote: "It is a disaster for us that good old Voskuyl won't be able to keep us in touch with all that goes on, and all he hears in the warehouse. He was our best helper and security adviser; we miss him very much indeed." Johannes Voskuijl died in Amsterdam on 27 November 1945. Otto Frank and the rest of the helpers attended his funeral on 1 December.
Biography on Bep Voskuijl
In 2015, Belgian journalist Jeroen De Bruyn of the Flemish newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen and Joop van Wijk, Bep Voskuijl's youngest son, published their biography "Bep Voskuijl, het zwijgen voorbij. Een biografie van de jongste helpster van het Achterhuis". The authors made clear that the aid of both Bep and her father to the people in the Secret Annex was larger than previously assumed. In Belgium and the Netherlands, the biography received a lot of media attention, mainly because the authors claimed that Voskuijl's daughter Nelly could be seen as a suspect of the betrayal of the Secret Annex. According to De Bruyn and Van Wijk, Nelly worked for the Germans during the war and had several German soldiers among her friends. She had a relationship with an Austrian non-commissioned officer, too. In 2018, the English version of the biography was published under the title "Anne Frank: The Untold Story. The hidden truth about Elli Vossen, the youngest helper of the Secret Annex".
