Anne Frank's Family

by Mirjam Pressler

  Now I have to say something to Buddy in particular. He has no idea how often Anne talked about him and how much she longed to visit you and talk about all sorts of things with Buddy. The pictures you sent of the ice-skating are still here; she had a burning interest in his progress, since she herself loved skating so much and dreamed of one day being able to skate with him. Shortly before we went into hiding, she got a pair of figure skates, just what she wanted. Buddy’s style of writing also reminds me in so many ways of how Anne used to write, it is really amazing. Stephan has a very different way and both of them seem to be as good and well behaved there as our two were here. I read poems by Goethe and Schiller with Anne, and William Tell, the Maid of Orleans, Maria Stuart, Nathan the Wise, The Merchant of Venice, etc. She especially liked reading biographies, e.g., of Rembrandt, Rubens, Maria Theresa and Marie Antoinette, Charles V and the great men of Dutch history, and also Gone with the Wind and lots of good novels.

  Edith and Margot were both keen readers too.

  Except to you all I am writing to almost no one about Edith and the children. What would be the point?… I hope that Erich will get better soon, I don’t know what arthritis is and have to ask about it. Goldstein told me about Leni’s business competence, Herbert wrote about it too, it’s hard for me to imagine! G[oldstein] was especially attentive and kind to me, he gave me a pair of boots as well & I stayed with him in Rotterdam for two nights last week. He is less kind to his wife, which I didn’t like at all. My feelings weren’t wrong. I have gathered a lot of information here and I have the impression that he currently has mistaken ideas about the local market here. A merchant who sells to factories always has a different outlook from someone who deals in proprietary materials. I also went to The Hague because of Hanneli Goslar and so the time flew by. I do basically nothing in terms of actual business and am working only on new plans. Business in another letter. All my love and warmest greetings.

  It was Leni who read the letter to the family. When she lowered it, she saw how pale Buddy’s face was. “Anne,” he said, in a strangled voice, “suddenly I could see her clear as daylight before my eyes.” It was visibly hard for him to regain his composure. Leni put a consoling hand on his. Then he jumped up and ran out of the room. She could hear the water in the bathroom running, for a long time, and she knew he was washing his face with cold water to calm himself down. When he came back to the dining room, Imperia was just serving the soup, but no one had an appetite. “My letter must not have reached him yet,” Alice complained, “even though I wrote to him first, before any of you.”

  “You know how unreliable the post office is still,” Erich said soothingly.

  Then they talked about Hanneli Goslar, Anne’s friend from before. She and her younger sister, Gabi, had survived the Bergen-Belsen camp; her father had died there. Her mother had died in childbirth before the deportation, together with the baby. So Hanneli and Gabi were now alone, and it was good that Otto was looking after the girls. He and Edith had been friends of the Goslars’.

  Three days later, a letter from Otto arrived for Alice confirming that now he had received her letter too. “Dear Mom,” Alice read out loud, then her voice failed her, and she passed the letter to Leni to read.

  I’ve now received your letter from the 4th too. I know how upset you are, how much you are thinking about me, and how you share my grief. I am not letting myself go and am distracting myself as much as I can. I don’t have any pictures from the last few years of course, but Miep was somehow able to save an album [actually a few albums] and also Anne’s diary. I still don’t have the strength to read it. From Margot, there’s nothing except her Latin exercises. Since they ransacked our whole house, there aren’t all the little things that we were used to and that Edith or the children had. Obviously, it’s useless to immerse yourself in such things and thoughts, but of course a person isn’t always reasonable. I received your telegram, and it won’t be long before we can use the telephone again, but I’m afraid that I won’t be able to speak. In any case, write and give me your phone number.

  Again and again, Otto reported that people had written to him or visited him. Once, for example: “In May 42, Leni Leyens lived with us with husband and child, a good friend of Edith’s (from Wesel). I know that a brother, ‘Erich Leyens,’ was in Switzerland and I’m looking for him since Leni’s child was saved while there’s no word of the parents after they were sent off from Westerbork to Poland. Is there an office in Switzerland where you can inquire where someone is?”

  And he returned to the topic of how difficult it was to travel: “There are still giant complications about visiting, I can see it in my efforts for Hanneli and Gabi … The world hasn’t gotten any smaller and closer together, but rather split even farther apart! Still I hope that now that the war with Japan is over there will be better connections soon and all the censors, passport difficulties, and transit visas will fall away. But we have to be patient.”

  The postal service was definitely still unreliable, since only now did Otto’s answer to Buddy and Stephan’s letter of almost two months before arrive. Their letter was written back when they had still hoped that Margot and Anne might be alive, though one or the other must have had his doubts sometimes. It was Erich who would insist in such moments that there must be many, many people still alive but incommunicado in the Russian zone, and Leni might have believed him too. And if Stephan or Buddy dared to say “We would have heard from them a long time ago if they were still alive,” Leni was the first to cut him short. “Hope is the last thing to go,” she said over and over again. “We can’t give up hope.” Then Stephan and Buddy, so as not to make their mother more anxious, fell silent and clung to their hopes, at least outwardly.

  And now it turned out that Otto already knew of his daughters’ deaths when he had answered Buddy and Stephan. “Dear boys,” he had written:

  I’m very happy to have gotten word from you two as well. You are the only ones remaining of the younger generation, after all, & you have no idea how often we talked about you & the plans we came up with in our Secret Annex for when we would see you again. Your photographs were in our hands often, because we took almost all our photos with us. The rogues accidentally missed a bunch of photos when they ransacked the Annex so I still have them. Today I no longer make plans. My desire to see you is as strong as yours to see me but circumstances are even stronger & we have to submit and wait. I was very interested to hear all the details from Buddy, and I don’t yet know what Stephan is up to. Unfortunately, there is so little you can fit on a postcard. I am being well provided for here, nothing is missing in terms of daily life—it’s just everything is so empty, but I am staying on my feet & I don’t let much of anything show on the outside. Warmest regards to everyone there,

  Your Otto

  It wasn’t only Alice who was desperate to see her son Otto again: Leni also thought constantly about her brother. But they had to be patient. They could tell from Otto’s letters how difficult his situation was. He said that he had taken a trip to see Hanneli Goslar and the trip to Maastricht took several days: no trains were traveling south yet, so he had had to take a truck and it took fourteen hours, just on the way there. Next week he was planning to go to The Hague. Goldstein also thought that Otto should try to get to Switzerland, to discuss business matters. If Unipektin would send him a document attesting that his trip to Switzerland was urgently necessary for the pectin trade, then he could take the necessary steps at the consulate to apply for a visa. Even so, he didn’t know if he would be able to get a travel permit.

  Otto’s complaints about the authorities sounded all too familiar in Basel, since Erich and Leni had had corresponding difficulties themselves. Leni in particular kept getting worked up about it. “Anti-Semites!” she said when she read Otto’s letters. “There are anti-Semites in all the bureaucracies, everywhere, not just here in Switzerland. It’s no better in the Netherlands, it seems.”

  One Mrs. Auerbach from Amsterdam, who had managed
to come visit relatives in Basel, said that she was willing to bring things back for Otto. Leni started shopping—they had heard so many stories, on all sides, about how bad the economic situation was in the Netherlands, how you couldn’t get even the most necessary things, never mind any luxuries, so Leni bought everything she could think of that she thought Otto might need and added some clothes for Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl as well.

  Otto wrote that he had gotten the things:

  Everything is great, and it was chosen with so much love. I have almost everything I need personally now, and I am writing to Julius for a few smaller things, he can send them. There are still some sheets and blankets here. I’m sure you understand how happy I am to be able to help my friends a little after all the endless things they’ve done for me and since they don’t have any relatives. Suspenders, garters, and the like are just as welcome here as thread and elastic. The little dress fits Miep like a glove. I can’t give anything to Bep until Monday, since she’s on vacation. My old razor was beyond help so I was glad to get that too. I’ll give something to Mrs. Kleiman too, since Mrs. Kugler doesn’t need anything. She is back at home again. Kugler never said a word to his wife during the whole two years! He kept it all to himself and bore everything alone; he is a nervous person himself and suffered from it. His wife had to go to a sanatorium when she heard, and she is back there now. There is a lot more that I can’t write … I’ll do everything I can to come soon. But I’m also a bit nervous about traveling. I cry very easily these days and get excited over little things, as I’m sure you can imagine. But I assure you that I’m in perfectly good health. In fact I now weigh over 150 pounds! I brood about things as little as I can and I am sleeping well. It goes without saying I still think about Edith and the children, but I am trying to look more on the bright side rather than be sentimental.

  He also told stories about the many different people he was meeting, and about Hanneli Goslar, in whom he took a particular interest since she was, for him, a connection with Anne. Margot had had a lot fewer friends than Anne—one friend had not come back, and another was in Sweden, he would talk with her later. For the first time, he mentioned Anneliese Schütz, the future translator of Anne’s diary into German: “Fräulein Schütz is over 50, almost blind, and very alone, which is why she is trying to make friends with me, she was a journalist and was always very interested in the children. Margot took a literature class with her.”

  “Margot was always reading, all the time,” Buddy said to Alice. “I still remember exactly how she used to sit at the window and read when she was visiting. Back when you still lived on Schweizergasse.”

  “Margot was a very clever girl,” Alice said, and she started crying again, as she always did whenever anyone said anything about Margot or Anne.

  Leni cast a reproachful glance at her son and quickly said: “Otto seems to really have a lot to do, with all the friends and acquaintances he’s meeting and then his work.”

  Otto wrote about people he knew in his later letters, too, and said what had happened to them, and also wrote a lot about business matters. For example, he asked Erich once if it was worth buying Opekta “dry” and making it “fluid” in the Netherlands, and he talked about a competitor’s product that was so cheap it must be made from something other than pectin.

  Leni could clearly see how hard her brother was trying to make a new day-to-day life for himself. In a letter to Erich, he wrote about a baker, one of Kleiman’s customers, who was a forward-looking man. Erich told Leni about it. “This baker, Otto says, wants to try to bake bread you can store. He heard that in America they make bread that stays fresh for weeks without losing its taste. Apparently, he asked Otto if you can use pectin as a preservative. Because someday bakers are not going to want to work on Sundays and holidays anymore, that’s going to stop. Otto wants to know if anyone in Switzerland has already tried anything along these lines.”

  “And, has anyone?” Leni asked.

  Erich didn’t know but thought the whole thing was a good idea and a business opportunity.

  “Otto desperately wants to act as though his life is like normal,” Leni said to Erich. “Don’t you think he’s putting on an act for us? It can’t really work, in the end, running away from reality into an imaginary world. Reality forces itself back in on you, it’s ruthless and merciless.”

  Erich shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe, but he doesn’t have any choice, does he? Life goes on one way or another. He can’t just sit home and cry.”

  Then, at the beginning of September, Stephan fell ill. It started harmlessly, in any case Leni thought it was harmless at first, maybe a flu. Stephan had been cutting peat in the national service (students’ mandatory service working on farms); maybe he had caught something there. He complained about backaches, sore hips and legs, everything vague. He had a fever, which confirmed Leni’s impression that it was a flu. But naturally they called Dr. Brühl, their doctor, who also said that aching limbs often accompanied a bad case of the flu. He prescribed a syrup for the fever and a powder for the aches and pains, and said that a compress would be good for his leg; he should drink a lot of fluids, especially chamomile tea. Alice immediately took over the nursing, Imperia made the tea, Leni made the compress and sent Buddy out of the sickroom because she was afraid he might catch it. But nothing helped. Stephan said the pain was unbearable; he burned with fever and barely reacted when anyone spoke to him. Leni sent for the doctor again, who was shocked when he saw Stephan’s condition and immediately sent him to the hospital. The doctors there couldn’t say anything yet, only that they would have to wait and see.

  On Herbstgasse they were in despair, especially Alice, seized with fear that she might lose another grandchild. Leni tried to keep calm. At the hospital, the doctors said it was an inflammation of the hip joint, possibly also a sepsis, of an unclear cause, and they mentioned a new medicine, penicillin, that people were saying worked miracles. They wanted to try it on Stephan.

  Leni sat at her son’s bedside. They had put him in traction. He had a fever and kept sinking into a restless sleep. She wiped off his forehead now and then with a moist washcloth, but whenever he grew calmer, she was plunged deeper into her own panic. The uncertainty, this battle between hope and fear, created a tension in her that was almost impossible to bear. This was how Otto must have felt before he learned the terrible truth.

  To distract herself with something to do, Leni took a writing pad out of her bag and wrote a letter to her brother, telling him about Stephan’s illness:

  He is in unspeakable pain & all of us with him. How Mother can withstand all these worries is a mystery to me, but she always was & still is the most amazing woman & I hope with all my heart that you can come soon and at least feel for yourself her enormous love. She is basically healthy but 80 years old is 80 years old. Ottel, now I’m adding my cares to everything, yours & all of ours are already big enough.

  The Goldsteins couldn’t tell you much about Stephan, because Mr. Goldstein was in the national service for six weeks & we’re afraid he caught something by the end, he is much too conscientious. I think our children were similar that way, Stephan like Margot & Buddy like Anne. Stephan frightfully reliable & hardworking, honest, strange like Robert, but fundamentally good. Buddy lively, egotistical, intelligent, artistically gifted, superficial, but also a good soul. We don’t have problems with either. Erich is devastated, he is staying home for a few days. Stephan is being tormented terribly with injections etc. Hopefully, they won’t have to operate. On top of it all, business is booming with two huge estate liquidation orders & I’m working, which Stephan always says he wants too.

  Continued on Sept. 5. Dearest Ottel, Today is so difficult for you too—I don’t need to say another word … I was surprised that you wrote so little about Frida Belinfante, she was completely fabulous when she was here & Mrs. Auerbach too, who will bring you lots more things, with some things for Miep and Bep from me too … It’s my opinion that we’re not going to see Paul ag
ain either, we’ve heard too many reports. You can tell Miep that I hate them just as much as she does, but unfortunately that doesn’t help anything.

  Just a couple days later a letter came from Otto, but not in answer to Leni’s letter about Stephan. It made correspondence so difficult, Leni felt. You write on one topic and receive a letter about something totally different. This time Otto had burst out with his grief and sadness after all. The letter, dated September 6, was addressed to Alice but was of course read by everyone in the family, as usual on Herbstgasse:

  I know that all your thoughts are constantly with me, but you can’t let yourselves wallow too much in such feelings. We have to do what we can for the living, the others are beyond our help. You know that that’s how I always felt. We had an unusually harmonious life together and I have no reason to blame her or myself for having made our time together harder than it needed to be. That makes it even harder to bear this fate, but that’s how it has to be. A letter came from America for Margot and Anne a few days ago, from a girl who was corresponding with both of them, without having ever met them. The girl wanted to start up their old correspondence. I answered her in a long letter—with many tears. Something like that is very disturbing, of course, but it doesn’t matter.