Anne Frank's Family

by Mirjam Pressler

  Once, she said: “It’s too bad that they never had children.”

  Buddy nodded, and Alice went on: “Sometimes I think that we’re a very unlucky family. Klärchen and Alfred died without grandchildren, Robo and Herbi have no children, Margot and Anne, God curse their murderers, are dead, all we have left are you and Stephan. Stephan’s not making any effort to get married, and what about you?”

  “I’m still so young,” Buddy said. “I’m not ready to get married yet, you’ll have to wait a little.”

  She turned aside, to the window, and said: “How long do you think I can wait, then?”

  Buddy gripped her hand, which had gotten shockingly delicate and fragile, and kissed it. And suddenly it struck him how long it had been since he had seen her with needlework in her hands.

  Sometimes Alice sat in her chair for hours at a time, looking out the window and reacting only with a vague smile when someone said something to her. Then she would ask Buddy to tell her about the Ice Revue, about the foreign cities he had seen and the many people he had met. Buddy was always ready to tell anecdotes and stories, for instance, that both the day porter and the night porter at the Cairo Hotel were Jewish. He tried to paint what he had experienced in the most vivid possible colors, describing the Nile, the desert, the pyramids, the bazaars, the luxuries at the Alexandria hotel, the veiled women entirely covered except for their eyes, but what eyes! and so on, and he was happy when he could make his grandmother smile.

  It was touching how Herbert took care of his mother: he saw her every wish in her eyes, brought her her meals, and ate upstairs with her himself when she couldn’t or didn’t want to go downstairs; he read to her and, when she wanted, helped her down the stairs and back up again later. “He is making up for all the worries he caused her over the years,” Leni said, and Erich said, “It’s about time he made up for some of it.”

  Grandma Ida was as sweet and inconspicuous as ever. She had knit Buddy new socks and a scarf from the leftover wool, although actually it was much too brightly colored for a young man. Leni and Erich were in good health and good spirits, fortunately: Erich was counting on getting a position at Maypro AG in Weinfelden. Stephan had recovered from his bad illness too—his hip was still stiff, but he had started to work again and even appeared in “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo,” a Basel cabaret. And was good too, Buddy heard.

  Something else happened in 1950: Anne’s diary appeared in German, in Anneliese Schütz’s translation, under the title Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank. It was published by the relatively small press Lambert Schneider Verlag in Heidelberg, after several bigger publishers rejected it. The first printing was forty-five hundred copies, and it sold only moderately well.

  The diary also appeared in France in 1950, as Journal de Anne Frank, published by Calmann-Lévy; in Great Britain in 1952, published by Vallentine, Mitchell, and in the United States, also in 1952, as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, published by Double day with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. In the United States too, it had been rejected by about ten other publishers. Only after the success of the play in 1955, and the movie version in 1959, did Anne Frank’s diary become a permanent bestseller worldwide.

  Buddy, who until then knew only the short excerpts that Alice had read him, could no longer avoid reading the diary itself. He started to read it and was deeply moved, shaken. He had to keep putting the book down because he could not bear the confusion and disorientation it stirred up inside him. Now it was clear to him why Otto had said that he had never really known his daughter; Buddy felt the same way. He sometimes had the feeling that Anne was so close to him he could hear her voice, her laugh, her boisterous cry of “I won! I won!” Other times, it was a new, strange Anne who appeared from the pages of her diary, an Anne he would have loved to meet in person. In the past few years he had said goodbye to the child Anne, cried for her and mourned for her, but his grief at the loss of this new Anne struck him unexpectedly hard. Every sentence brought her closer, every period at the end of the sentence took her away again. But through all his admiration and all the shocks of emotion he felt, the thought still forced itself upon him that the generous sentence she had famously written—“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart”—was written before she was sent to Westerbork, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, before she had really gotten to know the other side of human nature, the abysses. What would she have written after these experiences? This thought was so painful for him, though, that he quickly pushed it aside. Take it as it is, he told himself—her belief in human goodness is admirable, even if it turned out, at least for her personally, to be an illusion.

  The family in the garden at Herbstgasse 11. Front, from left: Herbert Frank, Alice Frank, Leni and Erich Elias, Ida Elias. Rear: Stephan Elias. (photo credit 11.2)

  Translations of Anne Frank’s diary (photo credit 11.3)

  He had another thought too: the book had come out in German in precisely the year that Anne would have turned twenty-one and become an adult. Alice had said that too: “She would have been twenty-one. I got married when I was twenty-one.”

  Buddy talked with his mother about his strange reactions to Anne’s diary, and Leni told him that it was exactly the same for her. She too kept having the feeling that there were two Annes, just as Anne had described it herself. “Like they always say about Geminis,” Leni said, “although I usually don’t believe that nonsense.” Buddy didn’t talk about the diary with Alice: he was afraid to upset her. Alice was so old by that point that everyone was gentle with her, even Leni, who usually loved to make pointed comments.

  One evening they talked about a certain Elfriede Geiringer, whom Otto called Fritzi and was mentioning more and more often these days. He had told Leni a bit about her on the telephone; she was a “fellow sufferer,” he had said. She was originally from Vienna and had fled the Nazis to Amsterdam; she too had been in Auschwitz and had lost her husband and son. She and her daughter, Eva, who no longer lived with her mother, had survived the horror.

  A faint hope sprang up in the house on Herbstgasse. They knew Otto, knew how dependent he was on a familial environment. He was not a man born to live alone, or at least not raised to—he needed to be close to other people. And Fritzi seemed better suited to him than any other woman: she understood Otto’s sorrow, they would be able to prop each other up, support each other. That’s how Leni saw it, and the others were only too ready to believe her. They hoped that Otto and Fritzi would become a couple. The more they talked it over, the more sure of it they became.

  Buddy’s time at home with his loved ones passed, and it was even harder this time to say goodbye, because this time Buddy was traveling even farther away from Basel. He was off to America. Starting at the end of the year, “Buddy and Baddy” would be appearing in Holiday on Ice. They had gotten in touch with the most famous ice show in the world through a former colleague in London, and in Basel itself, where the show was performing, they auditioned their number. When they were offered a contract, they were thrilled to accept, and on December 14, Buddy was off to New York. He had become a real globe-trotter, as Leni put it, with pride but also a little sadness. America was far away—who knew when they would see him again. When Buddy said goodbye to Alice, he kissed her especially tenderly, as though he knew that this farewell might be their last.

  12.

  The Globe-Trotter

  So began Buddy’s time with Holiday on Ice, which would last fourteen years. He got to know many countries, many cities, many people, and everywhere he went he wrote letters back to Herbstgasse, telling stories about his experiences and his success. For a few years it was all new and exciting, and it filled Buddy with a certain pride, of course, that he was earning comparatively good money, though it also depressed him, as he wrote once, that after five years of a good income he didn’t actually have enough cash to be able to pay the accumulated interest on the mortgage without difficulties. “If only the house turns out to be a good capital investment! Doe
s it have fire insurance???!”

  In 1952, Erich and Leni at last received the long-hoped-for letter of citizenship. Erich Elias had written to the lawyer, Dr. Naegeli, back in October 1946:

  From my numerous experiences over the course of almost 17 years, I know that the Bern authorities are anti-Semitic on principle and act accordingly. It used to be different. A good friend of ours, Jewish, was the Swiss consul general in Frankfurt in the ’20s. For a Christian it’s enough to live here for a few years and have a bank account, but for us Jews they impose almost impossible requirements, and if they don’t have a reason to reject our applications then they simply invent one. First they said that seven years’ residence was insufficient, I should reapply in two years; then, after another two years, etc. In Basel, where people know me, my family and I were considered “well assimilated” after only seven years, but in Bern on the other hand, where they don’t know me, I am rejected after sixteen years in the country “due to insufficient assimilation.” Still others fulfill the necessary requirements for Swiss citizenship after only six years, by giving the authorities valuable paintings as presents.

  What a bitter conclusion to come to; there is hardly anything to add. But finally they had managed it. After more than twenty years!

  When Buddy heard that his parents had become citizens, he sent them a delighted letter of congratulations, dated March 20, 1952, and written in thick Swiss dialect. As in his early audition for acting school, Buddy used dialect to express his humor and high spirits.

  Life with Holiday on Ice was so new and exciting for Buddy at first that he no doubt spent less time thinking about Anne and the diary. But he did write in July 1952: “Otto should be careful and not sell the rights to Anne’s book too cheap.”

  This comment was in reference to the news that Otto Frank was planning to travel to America to negotiate about a stage adaptation of Anne’s diary and movie rights. Buddy, on a European tour at the time, wrote a letter from Valencia to “Dear Ottel”: “I wish you all the very best from the bottom of my heart for your trip to America! My thoughts are with you and I’m in huge suspense to hear how everything goes. Take care and don’t get ripped off. When the Americans really want something, they’ll pay any price. I assume that you have a good lawyer. You have relatives in New York as far as I know, don’t you?… I hope to hear from you soon, but you don’t need to write specially to me, I’ll hear everything from Basel. If you need any money over there, my account in New York is at your disposal, though there’s not much in it.”

  Leni was sorry that Otto wanted to travel alone; she thought that Fritzi could have easily gone with him. And in one letter Buddy raised the possibility of playing “Peter” if the book was turned into a movie or play. He asked the family in Basel to ask Otto if that might not be possible. But already in his next letter, he wrote that he was probably too old to play “Peter.”

  Anne’s diary had come out in the United States in June 1952 to great and immediate acclaim. Even before that, a journalist and writer named Meyer Levin had gotten in touch with Otto Frank: he had read the diary in French and was convinced that it had to be adapted for the stage, he was ready to do the job himself, as a Jew he was no doubt the right man for the job. He also said that you needed a producer for a play, and he suggested Cheryl Crawford. Otto Frank agreed to Levin’s suggestions, and so the disastrous relationship between the two men began. The trip he undertook in late September 1952 on the Queen Elizabeth was supposed to be a chance to arrange everything and wrap up all the issues of theater and film rights.

  On October 1, Otto wrote that the crossing had been pleasant and he had been treated “fabulously” aboard the ship. Then he expressed his admiration for the hotel: “a fine room, with a bath of course. Everyone attentive to their guest, a little sewing kit, washcloths, shoe shines, soap, fruit—everything perfect.” Buddy understood exactly what Otto meant—he too had been impressed, at first, by the luxurious arrangements in the better hotels. But in the meantime he had lived for years in hotels—more or less good, more or less expensive, more or less sophisticated; it was not that the differences were entirely insignificant to him now, but a hotel was, in the end, just a hotel. It wasn’t easy, never mind comfortable, to live out of a suitcase all the time, not to mention the never-ending restaurant meals. In any case, he had had more than enough opportunities, while waiting for a meal he had ordered to be brought to the table, to think back to the dining room on Herbstgasse and how everyone would spoon up their soup and then Leni would ring for Imperia, who would come in, and Leni would say, “You can clear the table now, please,” and then Imperia would take out the soup plates and come back in with potatoes, vegetables, and meat that his father would set to carving.

  American prosperity and its ostentatious display must have been astounding to Otto Frank for another reason as well. In Europe the economic situation had improved, and Otto’s business was going relatively well, but there was no question as yet of the real prosperity that ruled in the American middle and upper classes. The difference between everything that you could buy in America and the things that slowly made their way onto the shelves in Europe must have been astonishing to him.

  Otto described Doubleday: “The company has more than 4,000 employees, a gigantic office of 3 floors in a big building. Marks has the idea that all the publishers of Anne’s book should buy the building at Prinsengracht 263 together and set up a library for young people in the Secret Annex. That’s how they think here. The young people have ‘Anne Frank clubs.’ ” This was certainly the first time that Otto Frank experienced the kind of “fuss” about his daughter’s diary that he would have to get used to in the years to come. For now, the issue was the theater and movie rights.

  Buddy and Leni’s concern that Otto might not be able to stand up to the Americans was justified, even if Otto was not as alone there as Leni had feared. Nathan Straus, whom Otto continued to call Charley even after he had changed his name, looked after him. In addition, Otto saw Edith’s brothers and lots of old acquaintances and distant relatives.

  The business negotiations, though, were not going well, and before long Otto felt the first stirrings of doubt about Meyer Levin. With good reason, as would soon become clear. Cheryl Crawford, the theater producer Levin himself had suggested, didn’t like his play and turned it down. Another producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, who had made his name with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, was also unwilling to produce Levin’s play.

  But Levin was working like a fiend and did not give up. A burdensome and unpleasant tug-of-war developed. Buddy’s premonition that his gentle, cultivated uncle might not be quite up to the American business world had come true.

  In a letter to Fritzi, Otto described the situation in this way:

  I saw the lawyer and he foresees serious difficulties: anything another writer writes will no doubt have echoes of Levin’s script and no good, well-known writer will take on the job of delivering a script unless Levin is paid off first. There have already been long, tangled, nasty court cases in situations like this. That was this morning. This afternoon Levin came and explained that even though he doesn’t have any money he will not accept any payment for a play that is unacceptable. He says that as a writer, his name is at stake and that we need to give him the chance to find another producer if Crawford and Bloomgarden don’t like it. Since the information that he is writing the play has been published, it would give the impression that it’s no good and he is not convinced that it is. The problem is that Crawford never signed a proper contract with him, so there’s no clear agreement that lays out how to proceed. I am trying to keep myself out of it and explain over and over again that I am not in a position to judge. The truth is, I’m caught in the middle, so I proposed that Levin, Crawford, my lawyer, and I have a group meeting. I can’t tell you everything that’s going on in my mind and by the time you get this letter everything will have changed again anyway. I do nothing without a lawyer.

  Even that was not much h
elp. He had landed, inexperienced and naive, in a situation that would have consequences for him for a long time to come.

  Otto stayed in America for six weeks and met many people who were involved in the planned adaptation. There was already talk of a movie. Fritzi supported him from Amsterdam by letter: “So you’re doing Meyer Levin a favor & showing his script to another producer. It can’t hurt, but if Bloomgarten also doesn’t think it’s good enough, then you have to be firm and say enough is enough, and leave it to Crawford to find a famous author who can write a real play that will work onstage. Will Crawford keep her word and compensate Levin for his work?”

  But the negotiations were not easy. Meyer Levin clung to his adaptation and was convinced that he was the only writer who could do justice to Anne Frank’s diary. Eventually, in 1973, he would write a book about everything concerning the diary that was going on at the time—a book called The Obsession, with good reason. He was truly possessed. Otto decided “to sort things out” with Levin and then try to find a new writer for the dramatization. Fritzi commented on the situation from Amsterdam, on October 26: “I find it horrible that this situation has dragged on like this. What does he want?! Are you supposed to go hawking his play from door to door until you find a madman who is willing to risk putting it on? He doesn’t have another producer who wants it. I’m glad that it’s in the lawyers’ hands now.”

  In the letters that Otto and Fritzi exchanged during his stay in the United States, hints repeatedly surface that they had decided to marry and move to Switzerland. For example, Otto advised Fritzi in one letter not to rush into anything with the apartment, and in another he mentioned that he still had to pack up everything at Miep’s in the large trunk. He showed Fritzi’s picture to all of his friends and said that they were getting married. “You know that everything takes a rather long time with me, but then it turns out well in the end, right?”