As related in the previous chapter, after Hitler’s accession to Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, life was very soon becoming difficult for German Jews such as the Frank family. By late 1933, Otto had left his homeland for Amsterdam to create a new life for his family who would soon follow. For a seventh generation Frankfurt Jew it was a hard decision to grapple with. In his book The Pity of It All, the Israeli writer Amos Elon reflected on the German Jews and their one-sided love affair with their homeland. He says, ‘Before Hitler rose to power, other Europeans often feared, admired, envied and ridiculed the Germans; only Jews seemed actually to have loved them. . . . No other group of European Jews tried so hard to become a part of their host country.’ The attachment to Germany, the country he had fought for less than twenty years earlier, is true of Otto Frank. A decade later, in the confines of their hiding place, Otto had heard his daughter Anne railing against the wickedness of ‘The Germans’. According to their helper Miep Gies, he had corrected her that it was not ‘The Germans’ as a whole but ‘These Germans who are wicked’.
In 1938 Otto had actually attempted to get his family out of Europe to America, but a visa was refused, despite his connection to the wealthy Straus family. In December 1941, a visa was eventually granted for him to come to Cuba, but it was for him alone without his family, too late and too restricted, and as it was after Germany had declared war on the United States, it is not known if Otto ever received it.
Otto’s cousin Millie Stanfield, who was living in England at this time, also wrote to Otto and Edith suggesting the girls come to live with her in Surrey. Otto and Edith could not bear to part with their beloved daughters, which gives an understanding of the unbearable dilemma of those parents who did give their children up to the safety of British families through the Kindertransport children’s rescue missions. I had lunch with Millie in New York in January 1999, as she had emigrated to the US after the war. We celebrated her forthcoming 100th birthday with cake and champagne. It was a happy and convivial occasion, but quietly she told me that she had begged Otto to send his daughters to her in England, and he had had to live with his decision for the rest of his life.
Anne’s relationship with her father was complex and veered between adoration, frustration and anger. She loved him as a sensitive, caring father, who would always lend a listening ear to her problems, and as an intellectual from whom she had inherited a thirst for learning more about the world. Otto Frank made sure that the long days the family was in hiding between July 1942 and August 1944 were put to good use. He instructed the three teenagers, Margot, Anne and Peter van Pels, in the lessons they would have had at school, including the sciences, maths and languages. School textbooks had been packed along with other essentials for the period of hiding. The adults had also brought books and study courses to help while away time and keep brains alert and distracted from the daily fears.
Anne had a pet name for her father, ‘Pim’, and certainly in the earlier days of the hiding sought out his company and comfort. She admired him as a respected leader, as a shrewd and successful businessman and someone whose wise counsel had been sought by fearful members of the émigré German-Jewish community in Amsterdam who had frequented their Merwedeplein apartment in the months before going into hiding. On the other hand, the feisty and opinionated Anne felt that her father undervalued her views and her judgement in the intense situations that arose in the crowded, claustrophobic hiding place. She also felt that her father had sometimes unfairly taken the side of her mother during their frequent confrontations.
Towards the end of the time in hiding, Anne’s relationship with her father hit its lowest point, when she felt he had mistrusted her. Anne and 16-year-old Peter had often climbed up the rickety wooden ladder together to the bare dusty attic to spend time away from the adults. From the tiny attic window the two entrapped adolescents could look upwards to the precious sky, glimpse the top of the nearby Westertoren clock tower, and be aware of the seasons changing by the upper branches of the adjacent horse-chestnut tree.
Anne and Peter’s relationship had fluctuated from companionship and solace to teenage infatuation, which the pubescent Anne wrote about as ‘spring rising within her’. Many of her entries in the spring of 1944 talk about her feelings for Peter, as well as describing their conversations held when alone in the attic. By mid-1944, Anne’s ardour had dampened and she viewed Peter’s intellect with disdain. Nonetheless, her parents had obviously discussed their understandable concerns about the two hormonal teenagers spending so much time alone together, although Otto understood that if the worst should happen and the group were captured, this would have been Anne’s only romance in life. Otto took it upon himself to talk to Anne privately about his concern at how close she was becoming to Peter and her parents’ fear of her becoming pregnant.
Despite being in her father’s constant presence, Anne put her well-used pen to paper and on 5 May 1944 wrote him a candid and angry letter pouring out her feelings about not being trusted by her own father. She also mentioned that she felt she was becoming independent from her parents. The letter inflicted pain on Otto and subsequent guilt on Anne. In 2006, this letter became the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Amsterdam Historical Museum called ‘Anne Frank, Her Life in Letters’.
Anne justified writing the letter in her diary entry dated 15 July 1944, a particularly long piece where she compares the difficulties experienced by the young people in hiding to the relative simplicity of being an adult.
Why didn’t Father support me in my struggle? Why did he fall short when he tried to offer me a helping hand? The answer is this: he used the wrong methods. He always talked to me as if I were a child going through a difficult phase. It sounds crazy, since Father’s the only one who’s given me a sense of confidence and made me feel as if I’m a sensible person. But he overlooked one thing: he failed to see that this struggle to triumph over my difficulties was more important to me than anything else. I didn’t want to hear about ‘typical adolescent problems’ or ‘other girls,’ or ‘you’ll grow out of it.’ I didn’t want to be treated the same as all-the-other-girls, but as Anne-in-her-own-right, and Pim didn’t understand that.
Three weeks after this entry the family were arrested.
Otto came close to death in Auschwitz and, had the Soviet army not arrived on 27 January, he would not have lasted many more days. He weighed just 115lbs (52kg), having weighed 150lbs (68kg) even during the privations of hiding. He later described the miracle that saved him.
One day in Auschwitz I became so dispirited that I couldn’t carry on. They had given me a beating, which wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience. It was on a Sunday, and I said: ‘I can’t get up’. Then my comrades said: ‘That’s impossible, you have to get up, otherwise you’re lost’. They went to a Dutch doctor, who worked with the German doctor. He came to me in the barracks and said: ‘Get up and come to the hospital barracks early tomorrow morning. I’ll talk to the German doctor and make sure you are admitted’. Because of that I survived.
After his liberation from Auschwitz, followed by the long tortuous journey across still war-torn Europe and eventual arrival back in Amsterdam in early June 1945, Otto went to stay with Miep and Jan Gies. He had been told by a liberated camp inmate he met on the homeward journey that Edith had died in early January from despair and starvation, but he was still in hope that his two daughters had survived. Miep was surprised when he asked to stay with them. His response was, ‘I prefer to stay with you Miep. That way I can talk about my family when I want to.’ Miep recalled that he never really did speak about them, but she understood what he meant.
A visit by Otto to the home of two sisters who had come back from Bergen-Belsen resulted in him hearing that Anne and Margot had died of typhus and malnutrition, probably within one day of each other. But still there was no official notification of the news he had dreaded. In her biography Anne Frank Remembered, Miep later recalled what happened next.
Mr Frank held high hop
es for the girls, because Bergen-Belsen was not a death camp. There were no gassings there. It was a work camp – filled with hunger and disease, but with no apparatus for liquidation. I too lived in hope for Margot and Anne.
One morning, Mr Frank and I were alone in the office opening mail. He was standing beside me, and I was sitting at my desk. I was aware of the sound of a letter being slit open, then a moment of silence. Then, Otto Frank’s voice . . . ‘Miep . . . Miep.’ My eyes looked up at him. ‘Anne and Margot are not coming back’. We stayed there like that. Struck by lightning which burned through our hearts. Then Mr Frank moved to the door . . . ‘I’ll be in my office’ he said. I sat at my desk, utterly crushed. Then I heard the others coming into the office . . . ‘Good Morning’ greetings . . . coffee cups.
Unbeknownst to Otto, after the arrest Miep had rescued something belonging to Anne, in the hope she could return it in person to her. Miep continued to describe the morning Otto Frank had the terrible news confirmed. ‘I reached into the drawer, on the side of my desk, and took out all Anne’s papers, placing the little red-orange checked diary on top, and carried everything into Mr Frank’s office. I held out the diary and the papers to him. I said, “Here is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you”.’
Otto spent the next few days reading the personal journal and slowly realized he had never truly known and understood the inner depths of his younger daughter. All the frustrations, confrontations and disagreements with Anne came back to him and began to make sense. The fears and tensions of hiding and protecting his family had obscured the innermost thoughts, strong values and moral framework of Anne, the girl he had perceived as an opinionated, often disrespectful, hormonal adolescent.
Otto later said, ‘For me, it was a revelation. There, was revealed a completely different Anne to the child that I had lost. I had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings.’ Interviewed for Jon Blair’s 1995 documentary (also called Anne Frank Remembered), Miep asked those she imagined would be watching her on their TV screens, ‘Can you imagine this poor man? He lost his wife. He lost his daughters. But now he had the diary.’
Otto did not know what should become of Anne’s diary. On the one hand it was a private teenage journal, and on the other he knew Anne’s dream was to have become a published writer and journalist. Otto showed the diary to many people to seek their opinion and advice. Should it be kept private, or given a wider audience and published as a testament to the suffering of millions? I was told by the Anne Frank Trust’s co-founder David Soetendorp that when Otto showed it to his own father, Amsterdam rabbi Jacob Soetendorp, Jacob had offered these words of practicality to his bereaved friend: ‘Dear Otto, I understand its importance. But who on earth would want to read Anne’s diary?’
Eventually the historian, journalist and literary critic Jan Romein was passed a copy of the transcript by his wife Annie, whom Otto knew. Romein wrote an article about it, entitled ‘A Child’s Voice’, and this was published in the Dutch Het Parool newspaper. From the interest the article created, Otto found a publisher, a small Catholic publishing company called Contact. They agreed to publish it with much of what was deemed ‘unsuitable’ for wide readership removed. Otto also removed sections where Anne had not written well of her mother and the others in hiding, and in fact five pages where she speculated on the genuineness of her father’s love for her mother were entrusted to a friend, Cornelius Suijk, for safekeeping. These became known as ‘The Five Missing Pages’ and have never been published.
By 1952, Anne’s diary had been reprinted three times in its original Dutch version, had appeared in German, French and Japanese editions, and in the UK and US. The revered American former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had written a powerful forward to the US edition. The Belgian-born aunt of the British Labour politicians David and Ed Miliband, Nan Keen, had worked for the British publisher Vallentine Mitchell at that time, and been involved in the translation and publishing of Anne’s diary.
In 1953, at the age of 64, Otto rebuilt his shattered life and remarried. Elfriede ‘Fritzi’ Geiringer was, like Otto, a survivor of Auschwitz, who had lost her husband and teenage son in the final days before liberation. Otto and Fritzi spent the second part of their lives happy together and equally devoted to spreading the message of Anne’s diary. In the 1950s, before teenagers felt they could share their adolescent turmoil with their parents, they started to open up to Mr Frank, whom Anne had painted as a worldly open-minded man. ‘Mr Frank’ became to some extent a universal agony uncle. Otto and Fritzi worked closely together, painstakingly answering every letter they received on a typewriter and taking the trouble to stamp and post them.
This dedication undoubtedly provided a form of therapy, in the days before psychological intervention, for both Otto and his wife. David Soetendorp, who had followed his father’s vocation to become a Reform Rabbi, described in a moving address at the Anne Frank exhibition at Lincoln Cathedral in 1992 how as a young boy he would ask his father after each visit to their home by Otto, ‘Daddy, why is Mr Frank always crying?’ In his post-rabbinical career as a psychotherapist, David would definitely have the answer.
In 1960, like those former warehouses around it, the building at 263 Prinsengracht was becoming very dilapidated. By then it was already the object of pilgrimages by tourists visiting Amsterdam who had read Anne’s diary. Buoyed by the success through the 1950s of Anne’s diary, Otto approached the Mayor of Amsterdam and other friends and together the funds were found to open the building as a museum, known in Dutch as the ‘Anne Frank Huis’. A governing body, the Anne Frank Foundation, was also created.
The rooms would remain bare and unfurnished at Mr Frank’s explicit request in order to give a sense of the loss of those vibrant, opinionated people who occupied those spaces. Even now, as the thousands of visitors a day work their way slowly through the rooms, if you happen to be standing in a lower room and hearing the creaking of the old wooden floors above, it gives a shuddering sense of the ghosts of seven decades ago.
Otto Frank’s vision was clear: ‘I think it is not only important that people go to the Anne Frank Huis to see the secret annexe, but also that they are helped to realize that people are also persecuted today because of their race, religion or political convictions.’ Otto’s vision for the Anne Frank Huis was that it should not be a traditional historical museum, but more a centre of education, reflection and understanding. He also planned it as a venue for international student conferences. Just fifteen years after he had suffered so much at the hands of his countrymen, Otto Frank also determined that some of the first participants to be invited to the youth conferences should be German.
Michael Swerdlow was a 16-year-old boy in Liverpool in 1960 when he spotted a small but intriguing advertisement in the personal column of the Sunday Times newspaper. It was an announcement by the newly-created Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam. Although over fifty-six years later Michael cannot recall the exact wording, it referred to ‘The first ever international youth conference by the Anne Frank Foundation for young people to get a greater understanding of being and working together’. There would be four participants from Britain and in order to be one of them you were invited to write to the Anne Frank Foundation and explain why you thought you should be.
Having had an interest in the running of youth clubs and activities since his early teens, Michael lost no time in writing and posting off his submission to Amsterdam. Although he had read Anne’s diary, he had no strong emotional attachment to the book, but he had been born in 1943 at the height of the Second World War in Liverpool, the most-bombed British city apart from London. He had grown up conscious that he, as a Jewish kid, could so easily have been deported and murdered if the Germans had invaded.
To Michael’s huge excitement he was informed he had been selected to attend the conference and his recollection gives us a helpful insight into those very early days of Otto Frank’s educational mission. Carrying his carefully-packed precious cine camera (another teen
age passion of his) and a small suitcase, young Michael boarded a plane from what was then known as London Airport, as there was actually only one international airport serving London in 1960. Apart from a school trip to Belgium, it was his first time travelling away from home completely on his own, let alone to a foreign country.
Arriving at the Amsterdam canalside building on the Prinsengracht, young Michael tentatively rang the doorbell. The door was opened by friendly Dutch members of staff of the Foundation who greeted him in English. Michael was told that the building was not yet open to the public although they were soon going to open its doors as a museum. He was given an escorted tour of the building, which was still in its original state, and could feel and smell the evidence that it had been a warehouse. There was a small exhibition on simple boards of photographs, not of the Frank family, but of the round-ups of Jews in Amsterdam.
Michael was given a set of keys and told that during his time there he could have the run of the building to explore as he wished. He was then shown to the building next door which was the Amsterdam University students’ residential hall, recently completed and with all its facilities brand spanking new. This would be the participants’ accommodation. The first meeting of the international conference was to be held that evening, and knowing there would be a packed agenda over the coming days, he set off with his camera to indulge his hobby by filming the streets, buildings and people of Amsterdam.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 5
