The Baby

A moving, sobering reconstruction of the time spent in hiding in the Netherlands by Jewish baby Anneke Kohnke (b. 1940), who now lives in the United States. After the war, her life was marred by feelings of guilt, a devastating silence and lack of memories. Using interviews, archive film of life in the Netherlands during the German occupation, old family photos and voice-over narration, filmmaker Deborah van Dam takes us on an exciting search, presenting one revelation after another about the first four years of Anneke's life. Her mother was a friend of Anne Frank's mother in Germany. Later, the musical Kohnke family stayed with the Franks for a while at their home in Amsterdam. When it turned out the two families could not go into hiding together, Anneke was put into the care of a protestant family in the town of Voorburg. Fred Blacquière, Anneke's "war brother" who is now 66 years old, cherishes warm memories of this time. He invites Anneke back to the Netherlands to refresh her memory, and she reluctantly agrees. She attends the ceremony at which Cora (96), the courier who brought Anneke from Amsterdam to The Hague during the war, is added to the Yad Vashem memorial as a helper of the Jewish people. But then something turns up in the archives that sheds a different light on everything.