IN THE WINTER OF 1994, on a tour of the Anne Frank House, my imagination was captured by a guide’s remark that records exist documenting the fate of all the inhabitants of the secret annex except Peter van Daan, as she called him, in keeping with the names Anne Frank used in her diary. If this young man did not die with the others, I speculated, what might he have gone on to? When I began the research for this book, I discovered that the guide was either misinformed or romantically inclined. According to Netherlands Red Cross dossier 135177, Peter perished in Mauthausen concentration camp on May 5, 1945, three days before it was liberated. By the time I’d discovered this, however, Peter van Pels had been living in my mind for several years.
This novel is the result of the life Peter took on. It is based on what we know about him, his family, Fritz Pfeffer, and the other inhabitants of the secret annex, as well as the facts about the subsequent history of the diary, the movie and play made from it, and the lawsuits surrounding it in this country and abroad. I have, of course, imagined the letters sent to Peter by Otto Frank’s attorneys and Meyer Levin.
For help in researching the story, I am grateful to the Anne Frank Stichting in Amsterdam, the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel, the Wisconsin State Historical Society, the Boston University Special Collections, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library, and the entire staff of the New York Society Library. Among the scores of people who were generous with their time, expertise, and memories, I am especially indebted to Liza Bennett, Greg Gallagher, Nancy Hathaway, Nimet Habachy, Joan Leiman, Ralph Melnick, Arthur Rosenblatt, Fred Smoler, Michael Schwartz, Sharon Stein, and Marie Stoess. I also want to thank Richard Snow and Fred Allen, superb editors and good friends, who took time off from their work to read and comment on mine. And I am once again especially grateful to my editor Starling Lawrence for goading me on, reining me in, and executing both tasks with kindness and wit; my agent Emma Sweeney for her unflagging support and profound and thought-provoking insights; and my husband, Stephen Reibel, who introduced me to Peter.