Anne Frank's Family

by Mirjam Pressler

  How did it used to be out there?

  If only we had a little something!

  But other than two packs of cigarettes, nothing.

  That’s all we have, there’s nothing more,

  And there’s nothing to buy in any store.

  Anyway, you were not in the mood

  To celebrate, just to sit and brood

  In silence. So that’s what we’ll do,

  And everyone will understand too.

  The old companions, the bygone friends,

  The brothers living in foreign lands,

  All are thinking of you today.

  But there’s no pile of gifts out on display,

  No card for you, no telephone call.

  It’s like there is no birthday at all.

  And yet: cut off in our Annex today

  We nonetheless celebrate your birthday,

  Even if there’s no bouquet

  Of flowers in our room on display,

  We’re not alone, in fact the care

  And faithful aid we are given here

  Are worth more than all the presents in

  The world. Every morning, again and again,

  Our dear friends take good care of us,

  bring news and food they spare for us,

  They are always ready with head and hands.

  No one can know how much that means.

  What more can anyone want from life

  Than all your children by your side

  —And Pim as well—who want to bear

  The burden with you, and friends who share

  In everything with all their might.

  We “four” are together from morn till night.

  All we ask is to keep our health

  And get through the hard times—we don’t need wealth.

  We hope that peace soon be here

  And next birthday will be full of cheer,

  Without a care, and we’ll be free:

  That’s what we hope—and what will be.

  The peace they longed for was more than two years away, and there were to be no more birthdays free and without a care. Edith would never turn forty-five, Margot would just turn nineteen, and Anne would never reach sixteen.

  * * *

  1 A shop in Amsterdam.

  8.

  Uncertainty

  Germany capitulated on May 8, 1945—Japan only on September 2, after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but in Europe the war, which had cost roughly sixty million lives worldwide and changed the map of Europe for a long time to come, ended on May 8. Obviously, the sense of relief was great, including in Switzerland. At last people would be able to hear news of their relatives again—the sons, the brothers, the uncles, the cousins. Herbert left Herbstgasse and returned to Paris, presumably with the passport of his deceased cousin Jean-Michel Frank, which he had probably used more often than not during the war.

  A long period of waiting began. “Can’t you call Amsterdam?” Alice asked every day, and every day Leni and Erich explained to her that it wasn’t yet possible, there were no connections yet, neither by telephone nor by telegraph. “You know how it is after a war,” Leni said. “It can take months before the railroads are running again, before the post office is working. Remember how long we had to wait for Otto in 1918, long after the armistice was declared. Everyone else was back home except him.”

  Buddy wanted to know what they were talking about—he hadn’t heard this story before—and Alice explained: “Otto came home many weeks after the war ended. First he took the horses that the troops had requisitioned back to their owners, a bunch of farmers in Pomerania. And we sat there in Frankfurt and waited and didn’t know what had happened to him.”

  “It was two months,” Leni said, “and I think it was Alsatian or Luxembourg farmers, but it doesn’t matter, in any case we didn’t know what had happened to him for two long months. And now you’re anxious after only a couple of days.”

  Weeks went by, and the anxiety and fear on Herbstgasse grew stronger. The first pictures of the mounds of corpses traveled around the world, and the weekly newsreels at the movies showed spectral, starved men and women who staggered and collapsed after their liberation and were often in such wretched condition that they could not be saved. Then the names: Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor. And the rumors, passing by word of mouth, of unimaginable numbers: a million, two million, three million murdered, they said, maybe even more. It struck you speechless.

  They didn’t repeat these numbers at home, trying to keep the information vague in front of Alice and Grandma Ida. What they were hearing on the radio was bad enough, there was no need to trouble them further. And the truth was, there were so many people whose whereabouts were unknown: Otto and his family were no doubt somewhere in the Netherlands, but where was Paul, Ida’s son and Erich’s brother? No one knew what had happened to him after Switzerland had refused all his requests for an entry permit even after Erich had guaranteed Paul’s journey onward to Bolivia. The pictures they saw, and that filled Leni and Erich with horror, came mostly from Germany, from Bergen-Belsen—a camp on the Lüneburg Heath that had been liberated by the British—and Dachau, which the Americans had liberated. But people were saying that the worst things had happened far to the east, and news from there, from the Russian zone, only trickled out. Who could know where Paul was, where they had taken him? Leni and Erich talked about it as little as possible at home—what would be the point of frightening Ida and Alice, two old women, more than necessary? But you could sense their anxiety and concern. It filled the house and left everyone silent and afraid.

  Leni threw herself into her work, leaving the house early in the morning and coming back only for a short lunch, during which she avoided her mother’s and mother-in-law’s gazes. She told them something about her day at the store, described a lamp that someone had brought in or a painting, and tried to act as though nothing was wrong, before hurrying back to the store after the meal. She kept all the horrors that people were telling her to herself, just as she had during the war, as well as the rumors that kept popping up. “Propaganda,” Erich had said, “it’s all just vicious propaganda.” And they had believed it all too willingly. Now it turned out that they had been fooling themselves—and not only them: everyone in Switzerland had felt safe and sound. They hadn’t known anything, and Leni now had to ask herself whether that was because they had not wanted to know. Not only for their comfort, but also out of helplessness, because after all what could they have done?

  Leni was at the store most of the time, Stephan had started to work, Erich was usually on the road somewhere, shoring up his old business connections and striking up new ones, and Buddy was in acting school. The two old women were alone all day in the house on Herbstgasse, alone with Imperia, the new Italian housekeeper. Grandma Ida knit or sewed or cleaned, the way she had always cleaned, wiping and dusting where there wasn’t a speck of dirt to be seen as if the rags and dust cloths could clear away her troubled thoughts. Alice, who was starting to have difficulties climbing the stairs—her old bones were just not cooperating, as she always complained—sat upstairs in her room most of the time, in an armchair, some needlework in her hands, looking out of the window at the trees every now and then. It was summer, the first summer of peace after this terrible war; the birds were hopping on the branches, and if Alice leaned out the window, she could see the geraniums blossoming in the flowerpots on the veranda. A peaceful, happy view that she had always enjoyed, but it was empty and cold in her heart. Until she heard news of her sons, she would not find any peace. Even though Leni thought it was pointless, Alice wrote a postcard to Kleiman and asked him if he knew anything about what had happened to Otto. Leni took the card to the post office on her way to work.

  The first news came from Herbert. He had arrived safely in Paris, he wrote; life there was not exactly rosy, but he had found work at an American postal office and, since they gave him lunch for
free, he only had to worry about one other meal a day. The next bit of news came from England, from Robert and Lotti, who, despite Robert’s imprisonment on the Isle of Man, had survived the war safe and sound. Lotti was working with Robert now, she wrote, after having had jobs as a secretary at various companies during the war years.

  Then, in late May, there was finally a sign of life from Otto: a telegram addressed to Erich Elias, Herbstgasse 11, Basel. Imperia, who knew of course how anxious the family was for news, took the telegram right to Leni at her store. That night they sat around the table happy and relieved, even if they couldn’t understand why the telegram had come from Marseille. “ARRIVEE BONNE SANTE MARSEILLE PARTONS PARIS BAISERS—OTTO FRANK.” “Arrived in Marseille Good Health Leaving for Paris Kisses—Otto Frank.” There was, it’s true, no mention of Edith and the children, but Alice repeated over and over again, “It says partons—‘we’ are leaving for Paris—who else could it be besides Edith and the children? They’re alive; they’re fine. But why are they going to Paris? What do they want to do there? You have to tell Herbert, Herbert will ask around, maybe he can find something out.”

  For the first time in weeks they were glad at heart. Even Grandma Ida saw it as a good omen for her own son; she would definitely hear from Paul any day now.

  Telegram from Otto Frank in Marseille, May 27, 1945 (photo credit 8.1)

  It took four weeks for a letter to arrive from Otto, and when it did, it shattered their sense of relief in an instant. They felt as though the ground had been yanked out from under their feet. They sat at the table in the dining room, as usual, and read out loud to each other the letter that Otto had written on May 15, 1945, on the New Zealand steamship Monowai that was bringing him from Odessa to Marseille.

  Dear Mom,

  Dear everyone,

  Tomorrow we will be in Marseille, and then this letter will hopefully be forwarded to you. I assume I’ll be able to telegraph right away too so that you’ll know that I’ve returned safe. We sailed from Odessa. Did you get my news from Kattowitz & Czernowitz?! For now we don’t yet know if we can go back to Holland or if we will have to go to England for awhile first. For me the main thing is that we got out of Russia, and so we can be reunited with our loved ones. You have no idea how much I long to see you again. All my hopes are for the children. I cling to the firm belief that they are still alive and that we will be together again soon. They will hardly expect their Pim to still be alive—they experienced too much, and they must know how everything was in the “Auschwitz extermination camp” where I was. It’s a miracle I survived. I don’t want to write about it for now. Sadly the strain was too much for Edith. She died of malnutrition in the hospital, on Jan. 6, 1945. Her body could no longer withstand a flu. I heard this from a woman I met in Kattowitz after the liberation. I was also in the hospital myself, since 11/19, with “bodily weakness,” but I was able to recover.

  The closer we get to home, the greater our impatience to hear from our loved ones. Everything that’s happened the past few years! Until our arrest—I don’t know exactly what caused it, even now—at least we still had contact with each other. I don’t know what’s happened since then. Kugler and Kleiman and especially Miep and her husband and Bep Voskuil provided us with everything for 2 whole years, with incomparable devotion and sacrifice, despite all the danger. I can’t even begin to describe it. How will I ever be able to repay everything they did.—But what has happened since then? To them, to you, to Robert. Are you in touch with Julius and Walter?1 All our possessions are gone. There won’t be a pin left, the Germans stole everything—not a photo, letter, or document remains. Financially we were fine in the past few years, I earned good money & saved it. Now it’s all gone. But I don’t think about any of that. We have lived through too much to worry about that kind of thing. Only the children matter, the children.—I hope to get news from you immediately. Maybe you’ve already heard news about the girls.—What are your boys doing, and all the various friends? Is Herbi still there with you?—What about Paul? Where is Helen? But I can’t list everyone I want to hear about. I’m writing to Robert directly, I don’t know if the letter will reach his old address. London suffered a lot too, of course.—

  I will stay with the Dutch since aside from a tattooed number on my arm I have no papers & I’ll only be able to try to come see you later. Anyway, the main thing is that we are in contact. We hope to see you soon.

  With warmest greetings and kisses, love,

  Your Otto

  Only then did Alice and the others realize that the whole family had been at Auschwitz—a word they shuddered to hear and had avoided saying out loud during the entire period of uncertainty. Auschwitz, the concentration camp in Poland that was to become a synonym for the monstrous actions of the Third Reich as a whole. According to everything they had heard, Otto must have been through true hell. But he was alive. There was no news of the children, so there was still hope, but Edith was dead. Alice sobbed out loud. “She didn’t deserve that,” she said again and again, “not that.”

  “Stop it,” Erich said. “No one deserved that.”

  Alice could not be calmed down. She grabbed the letter again and read the horrific sentence out loud to the others: “She died of malnutrition, her body could no longer withstand a flu.” The letter trembled in her hand, her voice failed.

  Leni put her arm around her and tried to console her. “Otto is alive,” she said. “We have to be grateful that at least our Otto is alive. And I’m sure he’ll find the children soon, that’s all that matters now.”

  “We have to do something,” Erich said. “I’ll submit a search request to the Red Cross. We have to find the children.”

  “We have to write to him,” Alice said.

  “Where would you mail it?” Leni asked. “We don’t know where he is. All we can do for now is wait until we hear from him again.”

  “We have to talk to Dr. Iller,” Alice persisted. “He’s waiting for news about his mother, he must know what we can do, we’ll ask him for advice.”

  Grandma Ida stood up and went to her room. Maybe she didn’t want to bother anyone; maybe she just wanted to be alone with her own fears. Edith was dead, and what about her son, what had happened to Paul?

  The next morning, Alice sent another postcard to Kleiman and asked him if he knew where Otto was staying. And again, Leni took the card to the post office.

  It took a while before the letter they were craving arrived. Otto had written it on June 8, 1945.

  Dear Mom, dear everyone,

  Mother’s card dated 5/20 arrived at Mr. Kleiman’s today. It made me very happy to see your handwriting. At last we are in contact again! Since my various letters haven’t arrived here yet, I don’t know what’s reached you there, but I assume that my telegram from Marseille arrived. I heard here only that there was no more contact with you after June ’44, so you must have been absolutely thunderstruck when you received the telegram. I am writing this here in my office. It is all like a bad dream, I cannot find my bearings in reality yet. I don’t want to write much either, so here is a very quick summary.

  On July 6, 1942, Margot received a summons from the Gestapo to report for a transport to Germany. I didn’t want to let her go, of course, so we decided to disappear. You probably gathered from the last lines I sent you that I had already prepared something. We stayed hidden up in the attic of the Opekta building, where we also had the three van Pelses and later Dr. Pfeffer, the dentist, join us. So there were 8 of us and our people devotedly looked after us, despite all the danger involved. We never once went outside. Nevertheless, we were apparently betrayed, because the Gestapo came and arrested us in July 19442 and after a month in the Dutch camp sent us on to the “Auschwitz extermination camp” in Poland. I won’t go into details here. The last time I saw Edith and the children was on Sept. 5, in Birkenau, and the children—from what I’ve heard from other people—must have been sent to work in Germany or Czechoslovakia in October. I don’t know where they a
re and I never stop thinking about them. In November 44 I was so weak from work and lack of food that with the help of a Dutch doctor I was admitted to the hospital, and I regained my strength there until the Russians liberated us on Jan. 27, 1945. On the 26th we were taken out by the S.S., to be killed, but someone called the S.S. away before they could do it—it was a miracle! Whoever could walk had been taken by the Germans before the 16th. Now we had enough food. From there in early March it was Kattowitz, Czernowitz, and eventually Odessa, in stages, then through the Dardanelles to Marseille and direct to Holland. The initial plan to send us to Paris was not carried out.

  Edith had it harder, apparently. I heard that she lost more and more weight, suffered greatly from being separated from the children, and passed away of exhaustion on Jan. 6. She didn’t suffer. I am alone, I surely don’t need to say more.

  I found my old friends again here. Kleiman was in jail and in a camp for 7 weeks. Kugler was released after less than two weeks. All because of us. The company still exists, obviously there are no raw materials but there is a foundation for rebuilding. Everything in our home was stolen. I had stored a few things in other places, but not much. I have no hat, no raincoat, no watch, no shoes, except what other people have loaned me. And it’s impossible to get anything here either, there’s nothing in the stores. I’m living with Miep Gies. I have money for now, since I don’t need much.

  I want so badly to be with you all. Please write me with the boys’ address. I’m waiting to hear from you about all the many things we haven’t been able to hear about for so long. I also wrote only a short letter to Robert, I’m unable to write in more detail. I’m not back to normal yet, I mean that I haven’t been able to regain my equilibrium yet, physically I’m doing fine.

  [The letter is written on a typewriter, but Otto added the following at the bottom, by hand:]