Anne Frank's Family

by Mirjam Pressler

  Still, the major topic of their many letters was the conflict with Meyer Levin. On October 20, 1952, Otto wrote:

  The discussions about Levin continue and now it’s actually Doubleday that’s warning me and in a certain sense “stirring up trouble,” which I’m resisting. I don’t want any unnecessary bitterness or drastic measures, under no circumstances do I want there to be a lawsuit, either against me (which I don’t think will happen) or against Doubleday or Miss Crawford. Levin is now trying to find a home for his script with Peter Capell, who was in Amsterdam, and so a letter (very proper) arrived from him to negotiate the matter. I refused and discussed it with my lawyer, who will write the appropriate letter. I insist on the view that I am still tied to Crawford (and also want to be) and that Levin needs to understand that all his dealings with anyone else whatsoever are pointless if he and Crawford haven’t come to an agreement. He is fixated on the idea that his play is the only one that can possibly be performed. He needs to come to his senses and think things over.

  Fritzi wrote and asked if any progress at all had been made in these more than three weeks, and carefully expressed the opinion that Otto would have to be a bit more energetic about it. Otto replied on November 13: “A few quick lines. Very busy the past few days and it looks like at least a partial agreement will be reached in the eleventh hour. Levin will be allowed to show his script to a few other producers, all the details will be laid out, it’s a long contract but it lays out a clear path for the future course of events with or without Cheryl Crawford.” This contract also gave Levin the rights to have his play performed in Israel.

  The play ended up going forward without Cheryl Crawford, as it happens, who pulled out of the project in irritation. Otto Frank gave the production rights to Kermit Bloomgarden, who hired Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich Hackett, experienced scriptwriters (and married to each other), to write the theatrical adaptation of the diary.

  That was the end of the conflict for the time being, though there were still further consequences to come.

  Otto returned to Amsterdam. On November 10, 1952, Otto Frank and Fritzi Geiringer were married and began in earnest to arrange their move to Basel. Especially Alice was very anxious to see him. She was not doing well, and the following poem, found with her letters, must have been written during this period of waiting:

  No:

  They say that I always refuse and deny

  And miss out on lovely things thereby

  But I say “no” when it’s right for me

  Though I hate that word as much as can be!

  Like when someone wants to visit me,

  I say “no” and very vigorously,

  Because I can’t stand those idle questions

  It gets on my nerves and upsets my digestion.

  I’m never hungry when it’s time to sup

  So I say “no” when the food comes up,

  And send at least half of it back down

  And bravely swallow the other half down!

  When the paper comes and they say I should read it

  I say “no,” I don’t understand it or need it,

  I have no head for politics and news

  And say “no” to all the fuss and to-dos.

  I would like very much if I could say “yes”

  And not complain about every behest.

  If only Ottel were here to take me

  Into his arms & not forsake me,

  To that I would not say “no,”

  & I would be content, I know.

  Everyone in the house on Herbstgasse was glad that Otto had found another wife, and they were ready to welcome her with open arms. They were not disappointed. Buddy and his wife, Gerti, still talk about how happy Otto and Fritzi were with each other, how warmly and tenderly they treated each other to the very end. Everyone, including Alice, felt deeply grateful to Fritzi for giving Otto a new life after everything that had happened to him. And of course in the other direction as well.

  Buddy was also very happy for Otto when Otto wrote to tell him that he was planning to remarry. The first time he heard about Fritzi, their relationship struck him as rather like two children clutching each other in fear in a dark forest, but later, when he saw Otto and Fritzi together, he understood it better. Two people had found each other who were not only bound together in suffering but also deeply drawn to each other.

  One time, he asked Otto if it was their shared past that connected him to Fritzi. “Not only that,” Otto said, “but that is part of it. I couldn’t have married a woman who wasn’t in a concentration camp. We had similar experiences—she lost her husband and son, I lost my wife and daughters. When she talks about it I understand her, and vice versa of course.”

  By December 1952, Otto Frank was already in Basel. He was staying in a hotel but spent his days at the Herbstgasse house and spent a lot of time sitting with Alice and Grandma Ida, as he wrote to Fritzi. On December 10, Fritzi asked in a letter: “Is our room nice, warm, and cozy? Describe it to me a little? Have you unpacked and ‘rangschikked’1 anything yet?” Fritzi meant the room on the top floor of the Herbstgasse house, where she and Otto would live for many years. She ended the letter with these words: “So my darling, take care in the meantime, these are your last days as a bachelor so make good use of them.”

  After moving to Switzerland, Otto took less and less part in his pectin business, though he remained a director for some years, until he had set all the financial matters in order. He wanted to live with his family in Basel and dedicate himself to the “legacy” of his daughter, which he understood to be his personal duty.

  On December 15, 1952, he wrote to Fritzi, who was still in Amsterdam:

  The baggage came today and so I’m sitting in my (not very comfortable) room and writing a couple of very important letters, because I went to a tax adviser this afternoon and it seems that we won’t be able to avoid the income tax, and it is very high here too, though of course not nearly as high as in Holland. The defense tax is 10% everywhere and then there’s the normal income tax and local taxes. You can minimize the latter two if you move to a canton with a lower tax rate, and the adviser suggested Schwyz. I need to look into that, but you can see how it’s possible to save your pennies and let many thousands slip through your fingers. So don’t drive yourself crazy about little things. I just wrote to Barbara and will try to get paid in installments so that the amount will be lower for the time being. Now we wait. You see how desperately I need you here to discuss everything, since everything affects both of us together!… I haven’t spoken to anyone except the Schneiders and Max Lindner’s family, whom I had dinner with last night. I went to the Lindners’ on purpose because I wanted to find out the name of a good tax adviser. We’ll go there again when you’re here. Now it’s off to Immigration tomorrow.

  A comment in one of Otto’s other letters is also interesting: “I mentioned Hanukkah and no one here knew anything about it.” Clearly, Alice, Leni, and Erich were far removed from religion.

  Otto and Fritzi lived in the room under the roof—an extra floor added onto the house that was reached by a narrow, steep flight of stairs. The bathroom was down a flight, and Fritzi and Otto set up a hot plate and some dishes on a dresser in a little vestibule room that led to the toilet. This was where they usually made their breakfast. Their lodgings were not very spacious and were in no way luxurious: the most valuable pieces of furniture were a Biedermeier secretary with a flip-top desk and a bowed armoire, both from Frankfurt. Otto had given them to friends to store before the family went underground, and now had taken them with him to Switzerland. Sitting at this secretary, Otto answered many thousands of letters and inquiries about Anne’s diary that arrived over the course of the years to come.

  “The letters came by the sackful,” Buddy says. He also says that, in retrospect, this room reminded him of the rooms in the Secret Annex where the family in hiding had lived in similarly spartan and cramped conditions. Maybe that is why Otto never needed anythin
g special. Gerti, Buddy’s wife, says that this comparison struck her too. Here in the Herbstgasse house, Otto also had a tree outside his window, another similarity to Prinsengracht—though here it was a beech, not a chestnut.

  Otto and Fritzi came downstairs to the dining room and salon for meals and tea, of course, like the other members of the family, but they spent most of their time in their tiny room. It must have been a very harmonious life that they led, for all its modesty; Buddy, at least, doesn’t remember there being any fights or arguments. He says that the first time he came home after Otto and Fritzi had moved in, it was as though they had lived there always, everything went so smoothly.

  On Alice’s birthday, her eighty-seventh, they were all together: all four children. Robert, who according to Buddy only rarely came to Basel, had made the trip for his mother’s birthday. Buddy, unfortunately, was missing, but he had sent a lovely letter and a present: a silk scarf. They all sat in the dining room; Herbert and Stephan had helped Alice down the stairs for dinner. She was wearing her new scarf, and Stephan was sitting next to her—the grandson who was celebrating his birthday too. Alice revived in the circle of her loved ones, although she had grown very weak by that point and everyone noticed how shaky her voice sounded when she recited the poem that she had written for her birthday.

  In all my 87 years

  I’ve had much laughter and many tears

  And always did everything I could

  To make our lives be as they should

  Your father, whom we so loved so much, he was honored by all of us very much,

  There were many things that he was spared,

  He and so many others about whom we cared.

  I thank you today for all your favors

  With all my heart—may your love never waver,

  And may your mother’s blessing always

  Accompany you on your paths and byways.

  I cannot write many words today, calm & reasonable I must stay.—

  It means so very much to me

  To have the “four” all here with me.

  It’s also a special treat for Stephan, I’m sure he feels in seventh heaven!

  My wishes apply to him as well;

  With him too I will not always dwell.

  I end with hugs and kisses forever,

  Otherwise my tears would flow like a river.

  Your Mother

  This flood of tears was probably avoided, but surely a few of the people at the table quietly wiped away a tear or two, in a premonition of the farewell that they must have realized was fated to come sooner or later.

  Buddy was in Antwerp with Holiday on Ice when Leni wrote to him, in early March 1953, with the news that Alice was sick: she was bedridden and had probably caught pneumonia. The news frightened Buddy, and he wrote back: “I am very worried about I. I hope she gets better soon … At her age a pneumonia is very bad, of course. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Let me know any further details.”

  Otto, in London at the time with Fritzi visiting Fritzi’s daughter, Eva, flew back to Basel right away when he heard the news. He spent a week with his mother, and she seemed to be doing better, so he returned to London to continue his visit.

  Alice’s poem on her eighty-seventh birthday (photo credit 12.1)

  Alice died on March 20, 1953. Leni was crying so much on the phone when she told Buddy the news that he could hardly understand her. “A stroke … she was gone just like that … put out like a candle … snuffed out.” She couldn’t say another word. But what was there to say, it had happened.

  Buddy had no words either. He did not say that life goes on, or that she won’t suffer any more now, or that we have to take care of the living, there’s nothing more we can do for the dead, the way Otto might have said. He went to his room, lay on the bed, and stared at the ceiling. He could not imagine life without Alice, his beloved I. From now on everything would be different, nothing would be the way it used to be.

  All four children of Michael and Alice Frank—Robert, Otto, Herbert, Leni—were together once more for their mother’s funeral. It was to be the last time.

  Buddy couldn’t come. He wrote on March 24:

  Dear everyone,

  I hardly need to tell you how terribly I will miss I. Her goodness, her sense of humor, her wisdom and intelligence, just to name a few of her good qualities, have made her a remarkable person in my life who was very important for me. Her loss is irreplaceable.

  My nerves have somewhat abandoned me in the last 5 days, probably because of I.’s death; I threw up several times for absolutely no reason, and I have no idea how I managed to get through the clown routines. But I’m better again now.

  Alice, the woman who had experienced so many heights and depths in her life, and who had shaped her family like almost no one else, was dead. Born in Frankfurt, and with an accent that always gave away where she came from, she was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Basel. To this day, the living room in Basel, Leni’s “salon,” is dominated by the painting of little Alice, and when a guest sits on the sofa, drinks her tea, and looks at the painting, she might well have to fight off the strange feeling that Alice’s spirit has never left the house.

  Life went on, as it always does, although the next bad news followed shortly after, in May: Robert had died, two months after his mother. When Buddy learned of his death, he thought: At least I. was spared that.

  Leni, Otto, and Herbert had lost mother and brother within two months, and even though they were no longer young themselves, they felt orphaned. Leni had inherited a difficult burden, because Alice, before she died, had said to her: “I always had to worry about Herbert, and when I’m not here anymore, you have to take care of him. He can’t manage on his own.”

  Leni had promised. Just as Alice had accepted as a given the responsibility of looking after Cornelia, Leni took on the responsibility for looking after her brother.

  There was only one woman from the older generation left in the house on Herbstgasse: Grandma Ida. Although she was eighty-five years old by that time, she never stopped cleaning and dusting, even where there was not a speck of dust to be seen.

  * * *

  1 Fritzi uses the Dutch word rangschikken, meaning “organize, put in order,” in quotation marks and with a German ending.

  13.

  The Play

  Buddy focused on the concerns of everyday life once more. He sent money home to Basel for the house and asked how much he should send for the burial costs. His professional life changed too: Otti Rehorek, his partner, retired from ice-skating and moved back to Basel after he and his wife, Bimbo, had a second child. Steve Pedley, Buddy’s new partner, turned out to be a stroke of luck—he became just as good a friend as Otti had been, and the new “Buddy and Baddy” were just as successful as the old team. They continued to tour with Holiday on Ice—in Italy, in Japan. Buddy wrote from Japan that he had met Mr. Washio, the publisher there of Anne’s diary, and that the Japanese edition was already in its eighteenth printing.

  The diary came up more and more often in Buddy’s letters in general. For example, he wrote that he had suddenly come upon a large photograph of Anne in the shopwindow of a bookstore in Kyoto, and how moved he was. Another time, he wrote: “Just recently I walked into the room of someone in the show and he was reading Anne’s book, without knowing that I was her cousin. I have a feeling that when the play comes out the book will sell even more strongly.” How right he was would soon become clear.

  The Japan tour was also an important and happy one for Buddy because he became close with a Holiday on Ice soloist, Irene Braun, whose name began to be mentioned often in his letters home. The show had traveled onward to Manila when Leni, at the bottom of a letter from Erich that was mostly about the house, finances, and taxes, wrote the following: “Just a few words from me, we’re doing well and I’m happy beyond words about our newly redone bedroom with the mattresses on the floor, carpets, curtains, built-in closet! I sold the leather armchairs from the din
ing room and put in I.’s wing chair, reupholstered. We’re happy for your successes and it looks like things will be getting better here too. You have ‘strangely’ a lot to say about this Irene! Is she your true love?? Just another of your mother’s indiscreet questions!! you don’t have to answer me.”

  What had Buddy written about Irene? That she was beautiful, intelligent, good-hearted, and that men were all crazy about her—every day she got dozens of calls, letters, and flowers “from millionaires and philistines.”

  After the Asia tour, Irene Braun’s mother in Munich wanted her to come back home. Buddy, back on tour with the show in America, toyed with the idea of marrying Irene, but her mother wouldn’t let Irene go, and the daughter gave in. Buddy was disappointed and depressed. Later, when Leni asked how his love life was going, he answered: “I could write a whole book on the topic … Nowhere in the world are the girls as spoiled, stupid, degenerate, and uneducated as the ones I always meet … It’s better to just sit in my room and listen to my records … Apropos of girls, that’s why I miss Irene, she was pretty as a picture, smart, educated, and sweet and had the same interests as me.”

  Meanwhile, there was progress with the play. Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich Hackett had written a first draft that Otto so disliked he was even sorry he had agreed to a dramatization of Anne’s diary at all. In his opinion, the play conveyed nothing of Anne’s ideals, of what he understood to be her “message.” After all the editions of the book and the countless letters he had received, he knew what people were most moved by: Anne’s difficulties going through puberty, the conflicts with her mother, and the love story with Peter. They were impressed most of all with Anne’s “optimistic approach to life,” as Otto Frank emphasized again and again.