Anne Frank's Family

by Mirjam Pressler

  And so she did, as she had all year. Erich’s pains grew worse; he was suffering badly with arthritis and spent several weeks at the spa at Baden, near Zurich, taking mineral baths. He wrote a long letter from Baden to Otto:

  My dear Ottel, I am always wanting to write to you, since my thoughts are with you & of you every hour. The nameless misfortune blankets everything else and I suffer deeply along with you. Edith and the children, I have their suffering before my eyes always. Everything else seems so meaningless to me & I am almost ashamed to tell you that I’ve been at a spa in Baden near Zurich for two days, and am supposed to take sulfur baths for three long weeks. I don’t know if I will have the patience for it, my minor pains seem too insignificant for this endless fussing.

  He told Otto about his “arthritis or arthrosis” and two injured vertebrae, then discussed business matters at length and in great detail: Unipektin, Opekta, the company organization. He again mentioned Goldstein, who was trying to organize something similar in the Netherlands. It is a very long letter, a bit scattered, full of plans and ideas and descriptions of various products, preservatives, sweeteners, and so forth. It almost seems as though Erich was trying to forcibly, even violently, drag Otto’s thoughts onto another track. Or maybe he was just bored by his forced stay at the health resort.

  While Erich was sick, the burden on Leni was even greater. She noticed that she had a quicker temper and wasn’t sleeping well at night. She was also crashing her bicycle rather often, luckily without seriously hurting herself. Some days, when it was too cold to ride her bicycle, she had to take public transportation to get to the hospital, and her store, and her clients. And of course she wanted to see Erich once a week. Sometimes she had the feeling that she was in over her head, drowning under the house, all the people, the business, which of course was even busier now that it was approaching Christmas. And on top of it all, Imperia had fallen ill. Luckily, Grandma Ida was able to help out, as she usually did on Imperia’s days off too, but of course it wasn’t the same. And then the news from Amsterdam was not exactly encouraging. Leni was worried about her brother.

  Leni Elias’s antiques store in Basel, Spalenvorstadt 3 (photo credit 9.9)

  Otto Frank was apparently working extremely hard to try to get his business going again, but without much success. Fortunately, he had friends—Nathan Straus Jr. had sent him money from America, Otto wrote. Along with the economic problems, he continued to have problems with the authorities too.

  But all that was supplanted by his daughter’s diary, which seemed to be taking up more and more of his life. He talked about it with friends and acquaintances. For example, he wrote to Basel that he had seen the Cahns on Friday,

  and I started to read to them from Anne’s diary, to get Werner’s opinion about publication. He has worked at Querido Press for years, you know, where Jetty worked too. To be continued next Friday, but already he says: Absolutely publish it, it is a great work! You can’t even imagine everything in it, I can’t translate it at the moment unfortunately, but it’ll happen and it will also come out in German and in English. It’s about everything that happens in a group of people while they are in hiding, all the fears and conflicts, all the arguments, the food, politics, the Jewish question, the weather, moods, education, birthdays, memories: everything. Miss Schütz, whom I visited yesterday, wants to translate a fairy tale for you—“Blurry the World Explorer”—a bear story … Monday I see Hanneli again, who is due to leave on an airplane with the two Neuberg girls on December 5. I hope that everything will go smoothly now. She is still bedridden and I am constantly comparing her to Anne, who was so much farther along in everything.

  Leni could easily picture that, since she also always compared young girls she saw on the street to Margot and Anne, and sometimes, when a thin dark-haired girl was walking in front of her, she would walk faster to pass her and look at her from the front in the sudden, irrational hope that maybe, just maybe, everything was not what they thought. How must it be for her brother! Hanneli Goslar must be sixteen now, like Anne, if Anne were still alive. Leni was not sure if she could have summoned up the inner strength and selflessness to take care of Hanneli if she were in Otto’s place. As it happened, Hanneli Goslar’s flight to Switzerland went smoothly; she stayed in a sanatorium there for three months, then in a children’s home until she immigrated to Palestine in 1947.

  Otto kept writing about his own desire to come to Basel: “If only I was there myself! Everything is going so slowly here, it never ends. I saw a lawyer to poss. try to apply for naturalization, but they advised against it, since measures to make things easier were definitely in preparation and expected soon.” On December 12 he wrote: “I was at The Hague yesterday, to work on my passport situation some more, for now everything seems to be on track but you can’t rush the gentlemen so it is more than questionable whether I will be able to be there by the 20th. Aside from the fact that I also have a lot of business matters to attend to & my stay would be limited. So we have to reckon with the possibility that I won’t be there until January. Who knows if it isn’t better that way, the anticipation will last longer! as they say.”

  Otto Frank was still officially stateless. He had applied for Dutch citizenship, but the process turned out to be more difficult than he had realized, and it would take four more years before he became a Dutchman.

  “Meanwhile, Mr. Kleiman is very sick again,” his letter went on,

  with another stomach hemorrhage. How he would have liked to meet you and to come with me, except for the business matters. Since he desperately needs orange juice and you can’t get anything like that here, I decided to call Robert! So we talked the night before last, the connection was excellent and we were both very glad to hear each other’s voices. Lotti too of course. So I hope to be getting something from them soon … I’ve given Edith’s muff to Miss Schütz! She is suffering greatly from the cold and I think that Edith would have wanted me to give it to her too. Miss Schütz will probably be sending you a translation of Anne’s fairy tale “Eva’s Dream” that she did for me for my birthday this year. I also visited Margot’s best friend, Jetteke Frieda, in The Hague. She is almost totally alone here, her father was gassed, brother shot by a firing squad, mother (whom she didn’t get along with) is with another man in Switzerland. Tomorrow I’m going to Laren and taking Abe and Isa [Cauvern] Anne’s diary to transcribe and correct. I’m done with it for now and I want to have a clean copy to show to publishers. Enclosed is a translation of a letter about Grandma. She also wrote about you, though not much—about your velvety soft crow’s-feet that she almost thought she was getting herself. She also wrote that she got your 1942 letter exactly on her birthday. I can’t get all of this out of my mind—and don’t want to either … I have to force myself to do things often enough, an unscalable mountain of correspondence has piled up and I can’t bring myself to write, plus it’s cold in my room and I can almost never write unless I’m alone. We don’t have any heat and there’s a stove in only one room.

  So Otto, encouraged by friends, was planning to have his daughter’s diary published. One of these friends was Dr. Kurt Baschwitz, lecturer and later professor of journalism in Amsterdam. He would later characterize Anne’s diary as “the most heart-wrenching document of the era that I know of, and an astonishing literary masterpiece as well. It shows the private experiences of a girl growing into maturity, her impressions stuck in close quarters with her father (whom she tenderly loves), mother (with whom she is often in conflict), sister (whom she discovers as a friend), and the other family in hiding, including the son, whom she starts to fall in love with. It must be published, in my opinion.”3

  Leni wanted so badly for Otto to come for Alice’s eightieth birthday, but it seemed less and less likely with each letter. And Alice was also in no mood to celebrate, as she insisted again and again and even expressed to Otto. He wrote on December 15 to his “Dearest Mom”:

  Today I received your postcard dated the 11th and I completely
understand that current conditions combined with Stephan’s long illness have dampened your thoughts of celebrating your 80th. We all imagined everything so differently, didn’t we! Still, you mustn’t think that my mood here is constantly depressed, I don’t let myself feel that way and also have so much to do most of the time that there’s no question of sitting and brooding. How I wish I was with you and the family in these days, but yes, there is so much one needs to do and so little one can do, we have to be content with the thought that I will be able to come soon, it won’t be long … An 80th birthday is certainly a time to look back and it’s important to think about the good things, not grieve about the past. All things considered you must be satisfied with the life you’ve led, everyone has ups and downs, but when you look back at your life as a wife and mother and weigh everything in the balance, you can’t be dissatisfied with it. As sad as much of it was, in the end we were together for a long time, and even though your children are scattered across various countries, in spirit they have all remained “the children.”

  Just like we had “Grandma” here, Lenerich and the boys have their “IIIiii.” That is a lot, and you can still do a lot, and be a help and an inspiration to them. Who else can say as much?… It’s especially bad luck that our good Stephan has had to suffer for so long, but hopefully his recovery has begun at last and one has to keep one’s courage and patience. This too shall pass. Just be brave and above all stay healthy. If everything keeps getting better, then our reunion will take place under a better star as well. I can’t write any birthday wishes—it all sounds too banal compared to the remembrances we all have predominating inside us. There were so many times that we talked with the children about how we would all try to spend their 20th birthdays with you. Enclosed is a little picture of Anne that Kugler copied, eventually I hope to be able to have some of Margot and Edith made too … With warmest wishes, constantly thinking of all of you, and with an especially loving birthday kiss to you.

  Baroque dresser, still in the Herbstgasse house today (photo credit 9.10)

  As 1945 drew to a close, Otto did in fact manage to come; he was in Basel for New Year’s. For the first time, Alice saw her son again, Leni her brother, Erich his brother-in-law, and Stephan and Buddy their uncle. And Grandma Ida the man who symbolized more than anyone else the hope that her son Paul might also still be alive: if Otto had survived everything they heard about on the radio and read about in the papers, then Paul might also have survived it, he was younger too.

  It must have been very moving, and heart wrenching, when Otto finally stood in front of the door with Erich, who had fetched him from the train station. It would surely have been on everyone’s mind that he never stood there alone in the years before the war—there were always one or two children with him, shouting for their grandma. Leni flung open the door and threw herself into her brother’s arms. Then she led him in to his mother. Buddy stood and watched. Otto seemed taller and thinner than he remembered, and much, much older. They hugged him one after the other, and everyone cried.

  Finally, they sat down around the dining room table, which Leni had set especially festively. Otto hesitantly stroked the lace tablecloth with his finger, picked up a knife and looked at the initials EJC on it, then a fork, and put it back on the knife rest. No less slowly and hesitantly, he picked up the napkin and looked at the napkin ring. Leni, watching her brother, fought to hold back the tears—she knew what must have been running through his head. Erich opened the bottle of wine, a good red that he had kept for a special occasion. They drank from the engraved glasses that they had used back in Frankfurt, and used napkins that Cornelia, many years before, as a young woman, had embroidered her monogram on. They sat surrounded by the mahogany Louis XVI sideboard with the marble surface and the Biedermeier china cabinet that contained Cornelia’s glasses, a tea service with an Asian floral motif, a French Biedermeier tea set that had also belonged to Cornelia, crystal bowls and glasses, and the walnut baroque dresser with three drawers, turned legs, and exotic wood inlays—furniture that they knew from Mertonstrasse—and looking down on them from the walls were Cornelia as a child, Cornelia as a widow, Elkan Juda Cahn and his wife Betty, Alice as a child. Through the open door to the salon, they could see more pictures: Leni as a child, and a photograph of Erich’s sister, Johanna. They sat there, looked at each other, and were so overwhelmed by conflicting feelings—their joy at seeing one another again and their grief at their loss—that at first no one could speak.

  Otto, always the most practical, pulled himself together first. He asked about Leni’s business, about Erich’s troubles, about Stephan’s health and Buddy’s prospects, and gradually everyone relaxed and started to talk.

  Only they suddenly fall quiet sometimes, we can easily imagine, and cast helpless looks at one another. Then maybe it’s Leni who holds her face in her hands and says in a strangled voice: “Those criminals, those criminals …” or “If only you had gone to America in time.”

  “Who could have known?” Otto said softly. “Who could have imagined something like this?”

  Then Erich would have said that they should have known; the Nazis had never made a secret of their hatred for the Jews. “By the Nuremberg Laws, at the very latest, we had to have known. The road to Auschwitz led straight through Nuremberg. And even earlier, Hitler laid it out clearly and unambiguously in Mein Kampf. A client showed me the page, even before the war, and I still know it by heart today. He said it loud and clear: ‘The Germans are the master race and are destined to rule over, enslave, or exterminate the lesser races.’ ” Erich fell silent, then added: “It was clear that he meant the Jews, of course it was clear. Still, no one could imagine that a people who had brought forth a Goethe and a Schiller could be capable of such barbarity.”

  Otto also went to the city hospital, of course, to visit Stephan, who seemed to be on the road to recovery. A deceptive recovery, since he had not yet overcome his sepsis; he was still to undergo a staph infection. They could not know that it would take months before he was well enough to leave the hospital. On New Year’s Eve they drank punch (which was actually mostly tea) and wished each other a healthy new year. Leni noticed that the others also avoided words like “happy” and “merry,” since the year just past, which had brought them so much sorrow, was still all too present. They could not imagine having a “happy” year ever again.

  Otto had brought several excerpts from Anne’s diary with him, and he read them to the family on the long winter evenings. Buddy remembers that Alice broke out in tears again and again, and stammered: “That we had to lose her so early …” She also regretted that nothing remained of Margot’s diary. “She was such a good child, such a serious child.” Then Otto said what he would always say when his older daughter came up in conversation: “Margot was an angel.”

  Buddy also remembers the constant mention of people’s names, often people he didn’t know, followed like clockwork by the question of whether this one or that one had been taken, or had disappeared. Arrested. Deported. Murdered.

  Baroque furniture, Herbstgasse, Basel (photo credit 9.11)

  Once, when Buddy was describing an ice-skating routine that he and his partner, Baddy, had memorized, Otto started to cry and told him, in tears, about Anne’s dream to someday skate with her cousin. “She talked about you so much, Buddy. She was a child, she worshipped you.”

  “She would have been sixteen now,” Leni said. It was what they would say again and again in the years to follow, on every birthday or holiday: “Anne would have been seventeen, eighteen, nineteen …” or “Margot would have been twenty, twenty-one …” or “Edith would have been forty-seven, forty-eight …” No birthday would pass without their falling into despair, and especially Alice would start crying every time. But at least they had the certainty of Anne’s and Margot’s deaths—Grandma Ida would only be able to say “It’s Paul’s birthday today. Is he still alive? Where could he be? Does he have enough to eat?”

  One time, Otto told
them about a visit to the police: they wanted to find out who had betrayed the families in the Secret Annex. They showed him, Kugler, and Kleiman photographs of different people and asked whether any of them had been there when they were arrested, because they might be able to learn from them who had turned the families in. “And we recognized two men,” Otto said, “two men who were in prison. You can imagine how I felt. Maybe we would find out who the betrayers were, the murderers who had the deaths of Edith and my children on their conscience. But a lot of the time these guys were nobodies, they only acted on the orders of their superiors who always kept their hands clean.”

  Then, soon, he would talk about Anne’s diary again, and that he wanted to ask his old friend Cauvern, who worked at a radio station, to edit the diary for grammatical mistakes and take out any Germanisms. For example, Anne wrote in one place that Peter had gotten a lighter for his birthday even though he didn’t smoke, and she had used the word vuurtuig as an overliteral translation of the German word Feuerzeug, even though the real Dutch word would be aansteker. Obviously, that would have to be fixed. After Cauvern had checked everything, Otto would try to find a publisher for the diary.

  Otto stayed in Basel for around three weeks—weeks that were full of both joy and grief, of memories spoken and unspoken. Weeks of sudden hugs and sudden tears. But the weeks passed.

  When he left, early one morning, they didn’t know what they should say. Alice stayed in bed, having made it known that she could not bear to see Otto walk out the door and not know when she would see him again, or even if she would ever see him again, you could never be sure at her age. Otto hugged and kissed Erich and Buddy, then hugged Grandma Ida, who had come downstairs to say goodbye. He wished her good health and said that he hoped she would hear about Paul soon, because this uncertainty was worse than anything, he knew that from his own painful experience.