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Some new documents have been recently uncovered giving us more of the story behind the Diary of Anne Frank:
On April 30, 1941, just days after a Gestapo courier may have threatened to denounce Anne Frank’s father, Otto, to the Nazis, he wrote to his close college friend Nathan Straus Jr. begging for help in getting his family out of Amsterdam and into America.
“I would not ask if conditions here would not force me to do all I can in time to be able to avoid worse,” he wrote in a letter that forms part of a 78-page stack of newly uncovered documents released yesterday. “Perhaps you remember that we have two girls. It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for. Our own fate is of less importance.”
Frank needed a $5,000 deposit to obtain a visa and Straus, the director of the federal Housing Authority, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and the son of Macy’s co-owner, had money and connections. “You are the only person I know that I can ask,” he wrote. “Would it be possible for you to give a deposit in my favor?”
That letter begins a series of personal correspondence and official papers that reveal for the first time the Frank family’s increasingly desperate efforts in 1941 to get to the United States or Cuba before the Nazis got to them. The papers, owned by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, had lain undisturbed in a New Jersey warehouse for nearly 30 years before a clerical error led to their unexpected discovery. Given the thorough historical research and extraordinary efforts to preserve Anne Frank’s legacy, the appearance of this overlooked file is surprising.
The story seems to unfold in slow motion as the painstaking exchange of letters journey across continents and from state to state, their information often outdated by the time they arrive. Each page adds a layer of sorrow as the tortuous process for gaining entry to the United States — involving sponsors, large sums of money, affidavits and proof of how their entry would benefit America — is laid out. The moment the Franks and their American supporters overcame one administrative or logistical obstacle, another arose.
... Ultimately, powerful connections and money were not enough to enable the Franks, not to mention most other European Jews, to break through the State Department’s tightening restrictions. By the summer of 1942, the Franks were forced into hiding. They remained in the secret annex for two years before being turned in, probably by the same courier who initially may have tried to blackmail them. As schoolchildren around the world know, the story ends with the death in concentration camps of 15-year-old Anne, her sister Margot and her mother, Edith, and the publication of Anne’s diary, now a literary and historical landmark that personalizes the Holocaust’s immeasurable loss.
(Source:
Patricia Cohen for The New York Times)
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