Two lives in hiding: Manuel Cortes and Anne Frank
Twenty miles west of Málaga, in the hills overlooking the Mediterranean, lies the picturesque village of Mijas, whose white cubist houses, narrow cobblestone lanes and charming shops attract thousands of tourists. In the 1970s few of them realised that the sculptured saints and angels sold in the antique shops had been looted from churches burned during the Spanish Civil War. As Ronald Fraser observed in the superb but little-known oral history In Hiding: The Life of Manuel Cortes (1972), “behind its tourist façade, Mijas today hides its past.”
A barber and deeply-committed socialist, Manuel Cortes (1905-91) was mayor of Mijas during the last year of Republican government in Andalusia. His wife Juliana, whose bitter pragmatism contrasts with his generous idealism, described their separation just before Franco’s fascists occupied the village in February 1937. She told him:
“‘Go.’ Not knowing whether I would ever see him again, and the people saying, ‘They’re coming, they’re killing as they come.’” He rushed up the coast toward Almeria with thousands of other refugees. As John Milton once wrote of another era of persecution, “They only lived who fled.”
When Manuel secretly returned to Mijas after the fascist victory in 1939, the terrified Juliana told him he would be shot if he surrendered. A denuncia, signed by three witnesses and easy to obtain in those times of rabid hatred, was sufficient to secure an execution. Most of the notable survivors had either fled into exile or become bandits in the sierra, but Manuel decided to wait for a regime change or an amnesty that would make it safe to reappear. He waited for thirty years, from the age of thirty-four to sixty-four, until 1969.
Manuel’s claustration has some notable parallels (though there were some significant differences) with the experience of Anne Frank, the most famous victim of the Holocaust. His description complements and illuminates the poignant revelations in her diary. Manuel feared betrayal but remained safe and undiscovered. Anne hid from the age of thirteen to fifteen (July 1942 to August 1944) and was betrayed by a pro-Nazi Dutch informer. The main suspect was her father’s warehouseman, the sinister thief Willem van Maaren.
Manuel lived alone with his daughter Maria and with Juliana, who thought only of his welfare and safety, and who supported the family for three decades in times of great hardship. Anne lived in the close confinement of 100 square feet with seven others: her parents and sixteen-year-old sister Margot, their friends the van Daans and their sixteen-year-old son Peter. With extraordinary generosity they increased their risk by inviting the dentist Dussel, who was not a member of either family, to move in with them. They were all secretly supported by Otto’s four gentile office workers: two men and two women. Anne knew that the Gestapo was arresting the Dutch Jews, transporting them in cattle cars to the transit camp in Westerbork and sending them from there to the gas chambers in Poland. If the Franks had been discovered, their helpers would have shared the fate of the Jews they were trying to protect.
In the Franks’ secret annex, everyone’s minor faults, irritating habits and often selfish behaviour were greatly exaggerated in these exiguous conditions, and in the tense atmosphere trivial quarrels became major crises. Forced to share a room with the dentist she came to hate, Anne had no privacy and had to listen to the adults’ revolting “blow-by-blow accounts of their trips to the bathroom”. Her last written words, “if only there were no other people in the world,” suggest Jean-Paul Sartre’s “hell is other people” in his play “No Exit” (both 1944).
Manuel first hid in a cramped hole in the wall near the entrance of his foster-father’s inn, where many people came and went all day. His shoulders touched the walls, he was unable to move about, and could only come out late at night when everyone had gone to sleep. After he’d spent more than two years in his little-ease, Juliana rented a house where he could live secretly with her. Finally, the hard-working Juliana — who began by selling eggs and built a prosperous business with taxis and trucks — bought her own house. On a dark, rainy midnight Manuel, disguised as an old woman, shuffled down the street to his new hideout where he had the upstairs floor. (When he was finally released after thirty years, he had difficulty walking in shoes and shuffled down the street in the same way he’d done long before when he’d changed houses.) But he was still in constant danger of discovery, and his old political enemies — one of whom he’d once saved from death — put pressure on the Guardia Civil to subject the stoic, ever-silent Juliana to frightening late-night interrogations in their barracks.
It was essential for both Manuel and Anne to fight boredom by keeping busy and by trying to recreate a semblance of normal life under extreme threats and pressure. Manuel did not do any household chores and, though he had plenty of time, did not take an afternoon siesta. He occupied himself by looking at the outside world through the narrow crack of his curtained windows, listening to the BBC and other radio broadcasts, reading newspapers and pulp fiction (the only available books), preparing illegally gathered esparto grass for weaving into baskets and espadrilles, playing with his daughter and then with her children. Frozen in time, forced into passivity and completely dependent on Juliana, he sometimes felt like a child. Though he’d once tutored younger boys after school, he lacked the patience to teach Maria and compensate for her poor tuition in the classroom. He had to watch the festivities of his daughter’s wedding while crouching down at the keyhole.
Anne also studied the street and neighbours through the curtains, listened to the radio and avidly followed the war news. But she had greater energy and curiosity, and a wider range of duties and interests. She helped clean the tiny flat, prepare the meagre and sometimes repulsive food, and wash the dishes. She did calisthenics and basic office work. She wrote her crucially cathartic diary; studied school texts and was tutored in arithmetic by her father; learned shorthand, French, and English as Otto read aloud from his favourite novels by Dickens. She devoured library books, mastered mythology, and established the genealogies of the royal families of Holland and Europe. She increased her collection of movie star photos and played with the two flea-bearing, rat-catching cats. Responsive to the natural world, which symbolised freedom, she fortified her spirit by gazing up at the starry, moonlit sky. She recorded that one night “the dark, rainy evening, the wind, the racing clouds, had me spellbound; it was the first time in a year-and-a-half that I’d seen the night face-to-face.”
Despite the differences in age, nationality and locale, these two prisoners had a great deal in common. Both narratives (Manuel’s oral, Anne’s literary and compressed) reveal the contrasting stages of their lives. Manuel described his childhood poverty and youthful years of oppression when the landlords exploited the peasants and the mayors “ate” all the taxes. He described his own short but effective term as mayor of Mijas, bringing electricity and telephones to the village, building a new road to the coast, and beginning agrarian and educational reforms. He rescued religious objects from the burning churches and personally prevented the massacre of brutal right-wing landlords by marauding anarchist militias. Yet one man he had saved later urged the Guardia to capture him. During the war Manuel became a medical orderly. After the war, Juliana anxiously recalled, “I was full of fear. I wanted to see him and know that he was all right, and at the same time I didn’t want him to come back.” Finally granted an amnesty in 1969, he emerged from hiding to find the world he knew had disappeared. Tourists had brought enormous prosperity to the region, the older men had left the land and the young ones lacked political awareness.
Anne devoted a few pages to happy memories of her pre-war years, swiftly followed by the Nazi occupation of Holland in 1940 and the persecution of the Jews. Constantly changing both physically and intellectually, Anne developed rapidly through puberty and her teenage years. She was frequently criticised and treated like a child, but had to sit silently for long hours and endure the same privations and dangers as the grown ups. Anxious and tense, tearful and vomiting, she resembled Maria as a nervous teenager. During her two years in hiding Anne became more self-aware and perceptive, more critical and alienated from her parents. She expressed intense dislike, even hatred, of Dussel, Mrs van Daan and her nagging mother who favoured the goody-goody Margot.
Anne developed breasts and had her first period, learned with sweet innocence about male sexual organs and sexual intercourse, felt a new surge of sexual awakening and physical desire. She first thought Peter van Daan was an “obnoxious dope”. But as the only boy in the house he inevitably became the focus of her attention and gradually replaced her beloved father in her emotional life. She fell madly in love with Peter, experienced her first kiss and poured out her pent up emotions. Manuel, who was able to share a bed with Juliana, was naturally more reserved about his emotional life. Though he wanted to have another child, he could not have one. Juliana’s pregnancy would have been scandalous for her and perilous for him.
But Manuel and Anne’s similarities are most striking. Both were in hiding for political reasons: Manuel was a socialist, Anne a Jew. They were innocent and had never committed a crime, but were forced to exist under a murderous regime that had killed many people and wanted to kill them. The Franks spread rumors that they had gone to Switzerland. Most villagers believed that Manuel was either hiding in Málaga or had escaped to France. A few thought he was hidden in Mijas, but no one actually knew he was there. Neither could be seen or heard in their hiding places. They faced unrelenting dangers and the slightest carelessness, even one cough, could be fatal.
Both experienced many terrifying moments. Manuel was seen by children who luckily didn’t know who he was. Juliana was almost trapped by a blackmailer and extortionist, who was exposed and arrested by the Guardia. The Guardia searched the house, not for Manuel, but for illegal esparto grass that Juliana threw off her roof and into the neighbour’s patio. The eight-year-old Maria threw vegetables into a pan of hot oil, which suddenly flared up, set the outdoor brushwood roof on fire and almost burned down the house. Just in time, a friend pulled down the post of the roof and “the whole thing collapsed and lay burning on the ground where they could put it out.” Manuel also had some serious medical problems. He had to tear out his own decayed teeth with only white wine as an anesthetic. When he had a high fever, Juliana treated him with penicillin and learned how to give him injections. When he developed an agonising pain in his left side, Maria took to her bed, simulated his pain and got the necessary medicine from the doctor.
Anne’s dangers in wartime were even greater. She too had decayed teeth and needed a painful root-canal, but was treated by the in-house dentist. Their food supplier, who accepted forged ration cards, was arrested. Crime was rampant, the office was burgled three times and the police investigating the robbery actually rattled the bookcase that covered the entrance to their hiding place. Worst of all, the house was threatened and shook when the British bombed Amsterdam in 1944.
Manuel once hoped to escape by boat from Málaga, but at the last moment their trusted contact was killed in an accident. Apart from that one chance, neither Manuel nor the Franks tried to escape. They cautiously hoped for the best and passively awaited their fate. Both closely followed the progress of World War Two. If the Allies were victorious, Manuel thought there would be a greater chance of an amnesty and Anne believed she would be saved.
Anne’s active imagination eerily foreshadowed her fate in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The girl, later separated from her parents, observed, “perhaps the day will come when I’m left alone more than I’d like!” She self-reflectively dreamed of a friend who had been deported, “dressed in rags, her face thin and worn. She looked at me with such sadness and reproach” and seemed to say, “Help me, help me, rescue me from this hell!” When Anne’s precious fountain pen was accidentally burned in the fireplace, she was “left with one consolation, small though it may be: my fountain pen was cremated, just as I would like to be someday!” This incineration, ironically, was the fate of many Dutch Jews.
If Manuel had been caught in 1939 he would have been shot; later on, he would have been imprisoned and eventually released. Anne, a mere child, had to face a more horrible death in a concentration camp. But if she had been a bit more fortunate and able to hide a little longer, she might have been saved. If, only two weeks before her arrest, the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler had succeeded, German policy would have radically changed. On September 3, 1944 she was sent on the very last train from the transit camp for Jews in Westerbork, Holland, to Auschwitz. She somehow survived selection for the gas chamber, but was turned into a starved slave laborer. In October 1944, three months before the Russians liberated Auschwitz, she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, near Hannover, Germany. She died there in March 1945, one month before the British liberated that concentration camp and two months before the liberation of Holland.
Anne’s diary ended on August 4, 1944, three days before her arrest. Other sources provide the details of the horrific, almost unbearable extinction of her life. Emaciated and ragged, tormented by fleas and lice, ulcerated and febrile, the frail and sensitive child saw her sister die. Separated from her parents and believing them dead (though Otto survived), she lost her will to live. She died of typhus, a more prolonged and even more agonising death than by cyanide gas.
Several Jewish prisoners, who had known Anne in Amsterdam, saw her briefly in the camps and described her desperate condition in Willy Lindwer’s compilation of six memoirs, The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank (1992). In Auschwitz she was reduced to a subhuman state: “the Frank girls looked terrible, their hands and bodies covered with spots and sores from the scabies. . . . They were in a very bad way; pitiful. . . . There wasn’t any clothing. They had taken everything from us. We were all lying there, naked, under some kind of blankets.” Another witness added, “Anne stood in front of me, wrapped in a blanket. She didn’t have any more tears… She told me that she had such a horror of the lice and fleas in her clothes and that she had thrown all of her clothes away. It was the middle of winter and she was wrapped in one blanket.”
There were no gas chambers in Bergen-Belsen, but conditions there were even worse than in Poland. Anne’s food, clothing and hair, the last things remaining in her shattered life, were taken from her and she was reduced, in Shakespeare’s words, to “a poor, bare, forkèd animal.” She told a friend, “ ‘We don’t have anything at all to eat here, almost nothing, and we are cold; we don’t have any clothes and I’ve gotten very thin and they’ve shaved my hair.’ That was terrible for her. She had always been very proud of her hair . . . which she’d playfully curled around her fingers.” At the end, she had typhus, with a raging fever and terrible thirst: “Margot had fallen out of bed onto the stone floor. She couldn’t get up anymore.” At that moment Anne lost her will to survive: “She was sick, too, but she stayed on her feet until Margot died; only then did she give in to her illness. Like so many others, as soon as you lose your courage and your self-control”— you die.
Both Manuel and Anne showed great fortitude when trapped and faced with the unremitting danger of discovery. “One small act of carelessness,” Anne wrote, “and we’re done for!” But they never gave up hope. Their personal narratives bear witness to their suffering and speak for all victims who sought justice against oppression. Juliana exclaimed, “politics brought us nothing but slavery and ruination, for him, for me and for my daughter.” But Manuel maintained an affirming flame and insisted, “my convictions will remain till I die.”
Anne also remained faithful to her ideals. Despite all her suffering, she finally achieved her goal and became a voice from the grave: “I know what I want, I know who’s right and who’s wrong. I have my own opinions, ideas and principles. . . . My greatest wish is to be a journalist, and later on, a famous writer . . . If God lets me live. . . I’ll make my voice heard, I’ll go out into the world and work for mankind!”
In 1973, four years after Manuel was freed, I had the opportunity to meet the 68-year-old man who’d suffered such terrible punishment. He’d lived through an era of savage repression; I was experiencing the new prosperity of Spain during the last years of Franco’s regime. When I was living and writing in a Spanish village nine miles from Mijas, I secured an introduction to Manuel from Ronald Fraser and asked at the market for the house of Cortes. Though he was the most famous man in the pueblo, no one recognised his name. He was still known as the alcalde, the mayor, though he had not held that office for 36 years, or as el escondido, the hidden one. The man I sought turned out to be short, with grey hair, green eyes and a face scarred by smallpox. The heroic figure was now a paunchy and tired old man, slumped in a sofa.
When I mentioned Fraser’s name, Cortes, cutting off the final consonant, called him Señor Frase, Mr Sentence, a good name for a writer. But he suddenly became angry and said Fraser had never sent his share of the royalties for their book. When I assured him that Fraser had sent the money, he insisted that he had received nothing but a worthless piece of paper and showed me a crumpled $500 check from Random House. He had never seen or heard of a check and was delighted to learn that he could exchange it for about 38,000 pesetas. He told me to wait while he familiarly shuffled down to the bank in his slippers. He soon returned with his fists full and pockets stuffed with money, which he’d exhibited to all his friends on the way home. He said he was very glad I had come, urged me to stay a while longer, and offered me tapas and a cognac. I was pleased that my unexpected visit had made Manuel more worldly and wealthy.
