Anne Frank's Family

by Mirjam Pressler

  Meanwhile, both Otto and Erich Elias, Leni’s husband, had joined Herbert working for the Michael Frank Bank. It might well have been a matter of necessity: by virtue of the reparations that the defeated Germany had to pay, and the worldwide economic crisis on the horizon, the economic and political situations were growing more and more serious. The New York stock market collapsed on October 24, 1929, and four weeks later the Nazi Party won nine seats in the local election in Frankfurt, up from four, receiving just over 10 percent of the vote.

  Death announcement for Trauda Ullrich, the Frank family’s cook for many years (photo credit 4.13)

  Erich Elias was the first to draw conclusions from the altered economic and political circumstances. In 1929 he accepted an offer to set up a Swiss office for the Opekta Works and moved to Basel, where Leni joined him two years later. In 1931, the Michael Frank Bank suffered another setback: Herbert was arrested by the authorities for tax evasion. He was accused of breaking the new regulations on securities trading with foreigners. Upon his release he moved to Paris, and at the judicial hearing that pronounced his innocence he was not even present.

  Also in 1931, the anti-Semitic owner of the apartment on Marbachweg gave notice that Otto Frank would have to move out, so the Franks moved into a smaller and less expensive apartment on Ganghoferstrasse. But the economic situation only got worse. A quarter of the population was without a stable income. In the Reichstag election of 1932, the Nazis won 230 of the 608 seats. The rise of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) to national prominence seemed unstoppable in Frankfurt as well.

  Not only the banking business was going badly; the factory in Bad Soden felt the effects of the Depression, and the dowry Edith brought with her into the marriage had already been spent. At the end of December 1932, Edith and Otto gave notice at their apartment on Ganghoferstrasse and moved back in with Alice on Mertonstrasse, to save money on rent.

  January 30, 1933: The president of the Reichstag, Paul von Hindenburg, proclaims Hitler the Chancellor of the German Reich. Soon afterward, on March 12, the Nazis win the local elections in Frankfurt am Main as well, and therefore expect to “legally” take control of city hall. On April 1, SA commandos are stationed in the entrances to Jewish warehouses and businesses, and others prevent anyone from entering the offices of Jewish lawyers or doctors. This preplanned “boycott” had the function of subliminally reinforcing the idea that all Jews were bankers, merchants, doctors, or lawyers.

  The Franks’ financial situation was dire. Alice traveled to Paris once more, to ask Michael’s nephew Jean-Michel Frank, an increasingly successful furniture designer, for a loan so that she could pay the mortgage for the large house on Mertonstrasse. Jean-Michel gave it, but it was soon clear that this was just a drop in the ocean. As a result, after long and painful discussions, they decided to leave Germany.

  It was a logical choice: under the present economic and political conditions, there was no hope for reviving their banking business. Another important reason, for Otto, was that Margot, who was in school by then, was being forced to sit on a separate bench in the back of the classroom with the other Jewish children. The idea that his children would have to experience such exclusion and ill will must have been unbearable for him. The last straw was when Otto heard the SA gangs marching by outside the window of the bank, loudly singing: “When the storm trooper marches into fire, / Oh, what a brave heart has he, / And when Jew blood spurts from under the knife, / Oh, that’s even better to see.” He later always described this incident to his nephew Buddy Elias as the main reason he decided to emigrate.

  Otto Frank decided on the Netherlands. First, he had friends there, since he had once tried to establish a branch of the bank in Amsterdam (which came to nothing, as it turned out). Second, his brother-in-law Erich Elias helped him get a job setting up a branch of Opekta in the Netherlands. Edith took the children to her parents’ house in Aachen, and Otto traveled to Amsterdam to start his new company. In early 1934, he brought the family to Amsterdam.

  For Alice, probably ever since Erich’s decision to move to Switzerland, it was clear that she would eventually move to Basel as well, to be near her daughter, Leni, and grandchildren, Stephan and Buddy. With the sale of the Frankfurt house to a businessman from Lorraine, she had burned her bridges. On September 21, 1933, Alice left the city where she was born, where she had spent her childhood, her youth, and her years as a wife and mother—the city where her roots extended down so deeply. The history of the Frank and Elias families in Frankfurt am Main had come to an end.

  5.

  But the Ones Who Stayed

  Were Scattered to the Winds

  So Alice moved to Basel, into a four-room apartment on the second floor of a house on Schweizergasse that Leni had found for her. The statutory declaration she had to give the German authorities upon her emigration is an interesting document, especially the three-page list of all the pieces of furniture she was bringing along “for personal use.”

  Alice had a housekeeper in Basel as well. She arranged her new life there, but Basel never truly felt like home, which was only natural: she was sixty-eight years old, no longer a young woman, and even though she had all the furniture she knew and loved around her, it must have been hard to move from a large house she had always shared with a large family to a fourth-floor apartment with a small balcony. It was surely also difficult to have to exchange a cosmopolitan metropolis for a tranquil Swiss city in which there was so much that seemed provincial. Everything was strange, foreign, and not what she was used to. Alice must also have missed her extended circle of friends and acquaintances from Frankfurt—even if she was a rather introverted person, it is still easy to imagine how lonely she must have often felt. A woman with her place in society had turned into an exile, a foreigner. And this turning point in her life was one she had to face alone: without Cornelia, without Michael. She was not the type to whine and complain; she must rather have withdrawn into herself. It would once again have been her needlework and handicrafts that filled her many uneventful hours and days. If Klärchen had not died so young, Alice might have felt less alone in Switzerland.

  Alice Frank’s statutory declaration upon her emigration from Frankfurt to Basel, September 2, 1933 (photo credit 5.1)

  Of course there were bright spots too, above all Leni and Erich and their two sons, Stephan and Buddy, who often visited her and whom she regularly went to see in turn on Gundeldingerstrasse. But a grown woman with children of her own has her own life to live—Alice knew that—and Leni was a very social person. She struck up acquaintances easily, and there was no shortage of German émigrés in Basel. Many of them remained in the city for only a short while before they had arranged their further travels, and they went to see Leni, asked her advice.

  Letters from Amsterdam gave Alice a certain amount of consolation and diversion as well, even if they did not arrive as often as she might have liked. The next generation, her grandchildren, had started to write—first Margot, who was already going to school, and then Anne. Margot’s letters were limited at first to “How are you? I hope you’re doing well,” or thanking Alice “for the lovely things” and sending “hugs and kisses from Margot and Anne.” One letter, addressed “Dear Grandma,” runs: “How are you? I hope you’re doing well. I hope Aunt Leni gets better soon. Love to everyone, Your Margot.” Later the letters grew longer. For example, there is this touching letter that Margot sent from Amsterdam to Alice in Basel in 1936, still in a child’s handwriting:

  Dear Grandma,

  How are you? Thank you very much for the beautiful present, it just arrived today and was a lovely surprise; also, thank you + Aunt Leni for your letters. I got very many presents + a lovely chair from Grandma. For your present, Mommy bought me a swimsuit with a jacket + pants, and with the rest of the money I’m getting my bicycle fixed. Many thanks to Uncle Erich too for the chocolate. Warm hellos to Stephan, Bernd, Uncle Erich + Aunt Leni. Hugs + Kisses, Margot.

  P.S. When a
re you coming to visit? We are so looking forward to seeing you.

  Eight months later Margot reminded Alice in a birthday letter that no one was going to be able to visit from Amsterdam. “But this year the family is not as big as usual.” She also, in her letter to Stephan, whose birthday was also on December 20, mentioned Alice’s seventieth birthday that they had celebrated together the previous year, in 1935. And she asked: “Do you still remember the summer when you were in Zandvoort [in Holland, on the coast near Amsterdam], and the winter before that when we were all with Grandma in Basel? This year you’re celebrating without us, but with a lot of presents I’m sure. I hope we see each other again soon. Greetings to Bernd and best wishes from Your, Margot.”

  Even aside from the occasional stays at Villa Laret in Sils-Maria, Otto often visited his mother in Switzerland, sometimes with both children and sometimes with only one. Buddy remembers a few things about these visits, for example, that Margot and Anne went with him to the skating rink and watched him skate. He thinks that Edith rarely came to Basel, though; presumably, she visited her family in Aachen instead.

  The year 1938 brought great changes. Erich wanted to bring his widowed mother, Ida Elias née Neu, from Zweibrücken to Basel. Since the apartment at Gundeldingerstrasse 139 was too small for another person and the children were growing up and needing more space anyway, they decided to rent a house for the family and move in together.

  They found one at Herbstgasse 11—a corner house in a row of six houses, built around the turn of the century, not especially big but with three stories and an attic floor added on. There was a small, pretty garden adjoining the gardens of the surrounding houses. The ground floor had a kitchen and a dining room with double doors that led to a living room, which Leni insisted on calling the “salon.” A few steps went down from a small veranda to the garden. The second floor had Leni and Erich’s bedroom with a nice balcony, then a child’s bedroom and a small room for the housekeeper. Alice had her room on the third floor—a large room with a view of the garden—and Grandma Ida was to move into the small room next to the stairs, above the housekeeper’s room. A steep set of stairs led up to the attic floor, which had a room for someone to live as well. Every room, including Leni’s bedroom, had a cord with a bell that would call the housekeeper. The house was very pretty, though much smaller than the old house on Mertonstrasse, and the rooms were certainly not large. Nevertheless, it was a refuge and a home for everyone.

  Alice must have agreed right away when Leni and Erich told her about the plan to move: it meant the end of her solitary life on Schweizergasse. In difficult times, people always feel the need to be closer to one another. And of course the money from the sale of the house in Frankfurt was gradually melting away, despite their frugal lives.

  The news from Germany sounded ever more threatening. The German pogrom that the Nazis called Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, took place on November 9, 1938: synagogues were destroyed, windows shattered, businesses looted. Today the estimates are that at least four hundred Jewish persons were killed or driven to suicide on that night, and of the nearly thirty thousand Jews who were arrested and sent to the concentration camps in Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald, another several hundred met their deaths in the following days and weeks.

  If Alice had sometimes felt homesick before—felt any melancholy longings for everything she was used to in her past—then now, by November 1938 at the latest, she must have realized what good fortune it was for her and her family that they had left Germany in time and were safe. Of course no one could know at the time that the Nazis would catch up to Otto, Edith, Margot, and Anne.

  Letter from Margot Frank to her grandmother Alice, 1936 (photo credit 5.2)

  Letter from Margot Frank to her grandmother Alice, 1936 (photo credit 5.3)

  When the pogrom in Germany took place, Alice was in Amsterdam visiting her son Otto and his family. Unfortunately, she fell sick there and was slow to recover. Robert wrote from London to Amsterdam while she was convalescing: “That was a pleasant surprise, to get Edith’s darling card this morning with a note from you included. It’s a good sign that you can get out of bed every day now and that you’re feeling noticeably better and stronger. […] Just be careful, and patient, so that you’ll get all your strength back. Be careful what you eat! I can’t say yet if and when I’ll be able to arrange to come to Holland, because first I have to try to do some business here, which is otherwise not only difficult but almost impossible.”

  Robert’s worries sound minor compared with the ones the German pogrom unleashed on the Jewish émigrés. There is a letter from Alice to Basel, after Leni and Erich had telephoned her in Amsterdam. She mentions many people who wanted to leave, or who had left, or whom no one knew about, showing the unease and fear after November 9, 1938, among the Jews who had left Germany. In Holland the concerns were apparently greater than in Switzerland. Alice wrote:

  Dearest children,

  I can’t tell you how happy I was yesterday to hear your voices! & I think you felt the same! If only the reasons for the teleph. call were not so unspeakably sad. Otto is running his legs off about Walter. [Julius?] is still free, they’ll probably leave him alone as a wounded veteran. The news we hear here is not to be described. It’s as much as I can do to summon up the least bit of selfishness, since I want to travel back as soon as possible. Anyway, the sun has to be good to me first & I have to be out of the house at least 2–3 x. The stairs will be difficult, but I won’t have to go downstairs much at Herbstgasse & so it’ll go better there.

  Today Elsa N. visited me, it was a miracle, she arrived by airplane & today has already flown off for L. In Berlin it’s unspeakably terrible. Anne Kater visited me too today, & Frau Goslar. It wears me out a bit & I should be having a lot more rest than is possible here. My nerves give out now and then, but otherwise it’s going very well for me, except for the little place that I’d love to get fully healed. I’m not taking anything, and haven’t taken any coramine for a long time, & I hope that I’ll be there before long, maybe not looking like a 50-year-old but at least like a 60-year-old. [She was 72.] Rob. wrote today that he is trying to write an application for Edgar & Nellie with Ilse, Edgar & Ernst are in Weimar [that is, Buchenwald] & how many others? What have you heard about Paul? There are not nearly enough facts to think concretely about & so you turn them over and over in your mind. […] Can’t Ivo look in on Grandma Ida? How is Lotti doing? Rob? Steger is at home, no word from Helen & Lisel. Max & Titty are already in London, Adolf and [illegible] too. Franz W. was on a trip and so escaped being brought in, Fritz Et. we haven’t heard anything about. It is absolutely not necessary that anyone come and get me, I don’t want you, dear Leni, to spend even 1 hour here, there is only unbearable news that I’m striving to avoid, luckily I can hear see & write well. The letter from Lili is horribly sad, I wrote her a few lines yesterday. You can keep the letter to Helen. Otto is calm needless to say, Edith is also doing what she can in her way. The nurse is not coming anymore & I consider myself really almost entirely better, it’s like a miracle! Soon hopefully I can sit at my desk chair and listen to Butzelein & you practice your Fr., Bübü [a pet name for Stephan]. Margot has an enormous amount of homework. Both the girls are darling and very considerate. I hope I won’t need to write so often anymore & that we’ll see each other soon, maybe in 8–10 days, I don’t want to take any chances & I’ll be fine for that long. I also wrote Rob. that he definitely should not come, he writes to me every day. All my love to everyone there,

  from I.1

  Alice recovered and returned to Basel, to the Herbstgasse house, where Grandma Ida, Erich’s mother, soon moved as well. Life went on once more.

  Margot wrote a letter to her “Dear Granny” for her birthday on December 20, 1938, and both the handwriting and the style clearly show that she had grown two years older. She was twelve.

  Many happy returns to you on your birthday, if it even counts as a birthday, but I’m sure you’ll be
spending it with Leni and Erich, and Stephan will definitely spend the day with you.

  It’s very cold here, but the wind from the east is as always the coldest. We went ice-skating with Daddy today behind the Apollo Hall. Mommy came too but didn’t go out on the ice. We went fast but then it was too cold and we warmed up at home and then kitty-cat came and joined us. I don’t know what else I can write. This letter is for Stephan too. Many happy returns to him too, and lots of hugs to Leni, Erich, and Bernd. Especially lots of birthday kisses from Your Margot.

  It was for this birthday too that Anne, then nine years old, wrote the first letters by her that survive, one to Alice and one to Stephan.

  Dear Granny,

  Many happy returns on your birthday. Is it as cold there, here we can hardly stand it, it is 8 below during the day, 11 at night. Is Pussi back again and is Stephan carrying her on his shoulder again. Was it Hanukkah there too, we had Hanukkah and there was a lot of “snoepen” [Dutch: “gulping down candy”]. We go to the ice rink a lot and I have learned how to skate too, I fel a lot at the begining now its better, I like it. Lots of hugs to everyone and kisses to you.

  The letter is signed “Zärtlein,” Anne’s nickname (meaning, “delicate little one”).

  To Stephan she wrote: