Lecture Date: March 14, 2023
The Synergy Periodontics and Implants Lecture
The most common question asked by those who tour the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is: “Who Betrayed Anne Frank?” 74 years after the Nazis’ tragic abduction of the residents of the secret Annex in August 1944, two Dutchmen decided to take on the unsolved mystery. Filmmaker Thijs Bayens and journalist Pieter van Twisk collected a team of some 20 experienced professionals: former police officers, journalists, war crimes investigators, forensic psychologists, historians, data scientists, and criminologists, with retired FBI agent, Vince Pankoke, serving as team leader. In the five-year long investigation, the team examined over thirty scenarios. Eventually, turning to a long-known piece of evidence, an anonymous note sent to Otto Frank shortly after his return from Auschwitz that identified the betrayer, the Cold Case Team concluded that the Dutch notary Arnold van den Bergh was the most likely perpetrator. When I was invited to write the story of the Investigation, I saw Van den Bergh as a tragic victim whose life was upended by the horrific military occupation of his country. My book offers a warning: there are uncanny parallels between the slow evolution of fascism in the 1930s and our present time when fanaticism, untruths and violence have become norms.
Further Reading Resource List provided by CRRL
Speaker: Rosemary Sullivan
Rosemary Sullivan, O.C., FRSC (Montreal, Canada, 1947) Sullivan is the author of 15 books, including biography, short fiction, poetry, and travelogue. She received her B.A. from McGill University (1968); her M.A. from the University of Connecticut (1969), and her PhD from the University of Sussex (1972). She then moved to France to teach at the Universities of Dijon and Bordeaux. In 1977 she hired by the University of Toronto, where she taught until her retirement. She held a Canada Research Chair in Biography and Creative Non-Fiction from 2001 to 2013 and was the founding director of the university’s Creative Writing Program in 2003. Between 2004-07 she was Maclean Hunter Chair of the Literary Journalism Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta. She is now a Professor Emerita. Sullivan has won a Governor General’s Award for non-fiction and the Canadian Jewish Yad Vashem Award in Holocaust History/ Scholarship for Villa Air-Bel. Her biography Stalin’s Daughter (2015) won the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Award, the BC National Non-Fiction Award, the RBC Taylor Prize, and the U.S. Biographers International Plutarch Award for Best Biography. She was also a finalist for the American PEN/ Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the National Books Critics Circle Award. Her latest book The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation (2022) was published in 20 countries. Sullivan has held Guggenheim, Camargo, Killam and Trudeau Fellowships. Aside from her writing career, Sullivan organized the international congress The Writer and Human Rights in aid of Amnesty International in 1980. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2012.