Anne Frank's Family

by Mirjam Pressler

  She can still hear the governess come in and say, “Come along now, Alice, it’s time,” how she would untie Alice’s apron and take off her play clothes, tear the doll from her hand despite her frantic efforts to hold on to it, and put her finger on her lips when Alice began to cry: “Shhh, Mama has a headache, you don’t want to make Mama sicker, do you? You’re a big girl now.”

  Even now it frightens her to think about it. Later, when she had children herself, she winced every time the expression “You don’t want to …, do you?” unintentionally escaped her lips, and she would try, confused, to find other words. Back then, when she was a child, “You don’t want to …, do you?” had worked on her like a magic spell to break her resistance, like a mysterious potion that paralyzed her. Little Alice let herself be dressed in the white undergarments with the frilly flounces, the pink slip that was so starched it rustled when she moved, and then the fine lace dress with a sash of the same pink color. She had gotten the dress only a few weeks earlier, because her old Sunday dress, which had been much more comfortable, was now too small for her—the pretty sky blue bodice was so tight that the governess could no longer hook it closed. Mother had ordered the fabric, sought out the lace, and summoned the seamstress, who in any case was at their house quite often. A redheaded, freckled woman from the Odenwald, she had sewn all day until the new dress was finally finished.

  Alice Frank as a child, painted by a Frankfurt painter,

  Professor Schlesinger, circa 1869 (photo credit 1.1)

  Alice smiles at the painting, a shweet girl, and for a moment she thinks she can feel the white stockings, the gray kid-leather little boots a bit too tight. Strange, how precisely she remembers everything to do with this painting; maybe it is because she has looked at it all her life, longer than anything else, longer even than the pieces of furniture she had brought with her two years ago when she moved from Frankfurt to Basel. It had hung first in her parents’ drawing room, then, after that terrible day when she lost her father and had to give up her familiar home and move into her grandfather’s house, in her mother Cornelia’s room, then after Cornelia’s death in her own house, first in Frankfurt, Jordanstrasse 4,1 and now here in Basel, Schweizergasse 50. When she thinks about herself as a child, she always sees herself looking the way she looks in this painting.

  Little Alice had hated being led in to Professor Schlesinger like that. She knew she would have to stand still, not move her feet even if her legs became stiff and started to hurt, not turn her head to look at a fly, that it was just as forbidden to scratch anywhere if it itched. She had always looked for excuses not to see the professor, but the governess had insisted. “You don’t want Papa to have spent all that money for nothing, do you?” No, of course she didn’t want that, Papa had to work hard for his money. Every morning he put his hat on his head and set out to the office, and sometimes, when the weather was so bad that you wouldn’t turn a dog out in such a storm, he sighed.

  The evening grows dimmer, the shadows rise up in the corners of the room, the hard handle of the window presses against her back, but Alice stays standing, motionless, even if the painting gradually blurs before her eyes and only a few bright patches remain visible. The older she gets, the closer the past seems to her and the more clearly images from her memory that she thought were forgotten rise up before her. She thinks about the sentence her grandfather had spoken so often, “The less future someone has, the more the present loses its meaning,” and she smiles at the thought that she had always taken this for idle chatter, the meaningless talk of an old man who doesn’t know what he’s saying anymore, because what would that mean, life without future? Back then, everything was the future, the whole world, and at least half her thoughts started with “When I grow up . . .” But now?

  This might be the moment when an idea comes to her—first vague, then clearer; first a “Maybe,” then a “Why not?” and finally a “Yes, that would be good.” She goes straight to the light switch, squints in the sudden brightness, turns back to the window, pulls the heavy curtains shut, and in a few quick steps is at her desk, also brought from Frankfurt. She flips open the desk, pulls open a drawer, takes out a black bound notebook, picks up her glasses, and sits down in the armchair. Now she knows what she has to do, and she is relieved that she thought of it in time. It is like an assignment that was given to her some time in the past and that she only now understands. She will write up her life story, for her sons, Robert, Otto, and Herbert, and her daughter, Leni—she will write a letter and give it to them next week when they all come to celebrate her seventieth birthday.

  Facsimile of Alice Frank’s letter dated December 20, 1935 (photo credit 1.2)

  Facsimile of Alice Frank’s letter dated December 20, 1935 (photo credit 1.3)

  This time it won’t be a poem—nothing cheerful, none of the usual allusions or inside jokes that call forth an understanding smile from the adults and a titter from the children, who of course know the family language perfectly well. This time it will be something to remind her descendants of her when she is no longer there, something to connect her children to a past that was her past too and that she has lost as a result of these barbaric Nazis. For who knows if she will ever get back what she has lost. Sometimes Alice no longer believes that the world will ever be the same again, the way it was—the dark clouds on the horizon are too threatening. In this weather you wouldn’t turn a dog out of the house, she thinks, without smiling. She unscrews the inkwell, takes up her pen, dips it in the ink, and begins to write:

  December 20th, 19352

  My dear children, gathered here around me after such a long time apart, on this, my 70th birthday—If I have decided to give you a very short look back & into my childhood life, there is no reason to fear any hidden motives. It is only that I feel a need to give you a permanent, lasting token of our time together today.—

  Most children know so little about their parents’ youth! And grandchildren are even less able to imagine that we were once young like them. Only much later do they realize it, & there is a lot they can understand & comprehend only then. Even adult children usually know only what they have seen and understood in person, & what they have lived through themselves.—

  Granted, your father told you many stories about his childhood & youth with his large family in the beloved old house in Landau. Respect for one’s elders and brotherly love laid the groundwork there for a beautiful & devoted life together. The fate of every individual was borne as a group, & every joy and celebration was shared.—

  Yes, the house is beautiful, Alice thinks with a certain melancholy, even if it did always strike her as a bit run-down. It was built in the Middle Ages and used to be a postal station, a lodge for mail carriages, horses, and travelers, but after 1855, when the Neustadt–Landau railway line was opened and then soon extended to Weissenburg, there were no more postal carriages and the owner of “Zur Blum” gave it up. That is how Zacharias Frank, Michael’s father, could buy it for his family in 1870. Of course Michael was already nineteen years old then, so he didn’t live there for long. Zacharias Frank, whose father, Abraham, had come as a private tutor from Fürth to Niederhochstadt, about six miles from Landau, moved to the city in 1841 after obtaining a license as an iron dealer. He had run a good business, started lending out money, and become a banker of sorts. Alice had never met him; he died the year before she was married. He and his wife, Babette, had nine children: four sons and five daughters. Michael was the sixth child, and Babette was quite worried about him because he was past thirty and still not married. So she was ecstatic when Michael and Alice got engaged. The whole family welcomed Alice with open arms.

  The Frank/Loeb house in Landau-in-der-Pfalz (photo credit 1.4)

  It was strange for Alice at first, all these people who talked too loud, laughed too loud, wanted too much from her, brought her so close. She would have preferred to hang back, go for walks alone with Michael; she would have been happy to be left in peace to organize her thoughts. But
that was out of the question. No sooner had she sat down somewhere with a piece of needlework—she always brought some needlework with her when she visited the family in Landau, as something to cling to—than a sister-in-law would come up to her, an aunt, a cousin by marriage, a neighbor, or even her mother-in-law, to drag her away at the top of their lungs and with an eagerness incomprehensible to her, to join them in some housework or in the kitchen, in a walk to the market, in a visit to a friend.

  Babette, her mother-in-law, was a friendly, good-natured woman who liked to eat and ate a lot, cried a lot, and laughed even more. But she was strong willed too, had raised nine children and kept the large house running smoothly despite her age. This woman, who at the time was probably younger than Alice herself is today, never understood how Alice could not know how to cook, how she had never learned and wasn’t trying to learn. “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” she said once, before the wedding, and when Alice answered, “We always had a cook, and she did all the cooking,” Babette shook her head in disbelief and cast a sympathetic glance at her son Michael. Once, Alice heard one of the sisters-in-law whisper to another: “Michael’s bride is too delicate to get her hands dirty.” It hurt her feelings, but she pretended she hadn’t heard anything.

  The children of Zacharias and Babette Frank (photo credit 1.5)

  No, it wasn’t easy for Alice to get used to this family back then, but she knew exactly what was expected of a good daughter-in-law and conformed to the expectations. And as the years went by, she learned to appreciate the friendly warmth of the Franks and understand that what she had thought was an uncultivated racket actually expressed vitality and affection, what at first had seemed like meddlesome curiosity later proved to be heartfelt sympathy.

  Alice smiles. She dips the pen in the ink and keeps writing:

  My childhood followed a very different course. As an only child, and with Mother so often ill, I got to know the darker shadows of life at a young age. It would not be entirely true to say that I felt my childhood to be a sad one, but it does not remain in my memory as particularly happy. The devoted love of my mother was compensation for much sadness. A grave nature & a tendency to brood has stuck with me to this day, & only in my mature years have I come to recognize that I also have many good & beautiful things to record, and which I should be thankful for.—

  This tendency to brood is a heavy burden: even today she has to fight against a certain melancholy disposition that she was probably born with; even today she has to make an effort to perceive the “good & beautiful things” that she mentions here. She was never able to just take life as it comes and enjoy herself. Michael was completely different that way, and she learned a lot living at his side, made up for a lot of the pleasures that were perhaps missing from her childhood. Not only was he quite a bit older than she, and so more mature and experienced, but he also possessed an easygoing naturalness and openness to the world that amazed her again and again. It was he who taught her how to enjoy the pleasures of the lighter side of life, and with him, with his death, part of her own pleasure in life had died too.

  The handwriting on the paper starts to blur. Does she wipe her eyes with a handkerchief? It’s been twenty-six years that Michael has been gone, for twenty-six years she has been a widow, but still she has never fully gotten over it. Of course it doesn’t burn as painfully as it did at the beginning, but a dull ache has never stopped boring into her; sometimes it flares up, and even now she probably thinks, with every decision she has to make, What would Michael say about that? What would he do in this situation?

  When I moved in with my uncle, the very highly regarded physician Dr. Bernhard Stern, I found what I had been missing in my old house—a constant good mood & lots of loving company from the cousins and the two sons of my dear aunt Lina Steinfeld.

  The connection with Bernhard Stern, the older brother of her father, August, and with the rest of the Stern family had played a large role in her childhood and youth, and was not broken off later. Her cousin Klara (whom everyone called Klärchen), three years older than she was; Richard, the same age as she; and Karl, six years younger, to some degree took the place of the brothers and sisters she never had and always wanted, and then there were Emil and Paul too, the sons of her aunt Lina, her father’s and uncle’s sister. How gladly Alice accepted every invitation from the Sterns in those years, and how happy were the hours she spent with them. She felt closer to this side of her family than to the other side, the ones in her grandfather Elkan Juda Cahn’s house, where she lived after the death of her father. At the Sterns’ she was introduced to the kind of cheerful family life that always failed to materialize at home with her ailing mother.

  We spent our happiest hours there, because my dear grandmother Helene Stern lived there too, and every day all six grandchildren flocked around her in her cozy little room.3 This brave woman, who with the work of her own two hands gave three children and two stepsons the opportunity to study & make a name for themselves, was duly honored & loved. We rushed to bring her all our little cares & worries and always found loving consolation and understanding there. Everyone was very happy to see my mother too when she visited.—

  It was this friendly woman, Helene Stern, who bolstered up the thirteen-year-old Alice after the sudden death of her father and the total collapse of her mother. She said that we have to submit to fate but that it is also important to get back up after every blow, just as the grass straightens back up after a storm; and she talked about courage, about trusting your own strength. Even now, Alice can hear her grandmother’s voice telling her: “You are still so young. Youth fights and overcomes, age waits and undergoes.”

  Alice sees before her eyes this woman with white hair under a little black bonnet, sees her small sitting room, which never really got enough light because it extended to the back of the house, and the dark furniture, including the glass cabinet with the Hanukkah menorah, the silver kiddush cup that was used only on the high holy days, and the long-stemmed glasses that were used almost as rarely. Alice almost never saw Grandmother Helene without a piece of sewing in her hand—there was always something that needed patching, darning, or repairing. “Hard work is its own reward” was another of her sayings that Alice never forgot. Silly proverbs often turn out to be wise truths, she thinks now, and you sometimes have to pay a high price to learn that. She dips her pen in the ink and continues writing. Aside from the scratching of the steel nib across the paper, and the ticking of the clock, all is silent.

  In my 13th year we moved to my grandfather Elkan Juda Cahn’s house. A lot changed in my life from that point on. Demands were made on me that were probably too great for my understanding, what understanding there was, which in any case left a lot to be desired. The main duty and responsibility that the family placed on my shoulders—to be a support for my mother—was difficult for me. I have borne this feeling of responsibility for her my whole life & gladly too.—

  Perhaps Alice feels thirsty at this point. She gets up, fetches a glass of water, and drinks it in long, slow swallows, then sits back down at her writing desk, props up her arms, takes her head in her hands, and gives herself over to her memories.

  Her father’s death, which struck her out of the clear blue sky, brought far-reaching changes. Her mother, Cornelia, moved with Alice into her own father Elkan Juda Cahn’s house on Hochstrasse. Cornelia’s mother, Betty, had passed away long before Alice was born. Cornelia’s weakened state of health certainly did not improve after this blow of fate: she was tormented with migraines and had such a weak constitution that she often had to take to her bed for days or weeks at a time. Alice suffered, and she had to admit to herself sometimes that she would have been very glad to have a different mother, more lively, more active, better able to give her some support in this new and often difficult environment. One who could have joined her on hiking trips in the Taunus, like the ones she heard about from her friends from time to time, instead of, at best, sometimes taking her to the Pal
mengarten in Frankfurt to feed the ducks in the lake. Of course she would have quickly shoved such thoughts aside at the time and berated herself for being a bad, ungrateful daughter. She loved her mother above all else, and when Cornelia took her into her arms and hugged her close, Alice could have cried with joy. Cornelia was a wonderful mother. So what if she didn’t go on any hiking trips and rarely went out to see people, Alice had friends of her own. It was Cornelia who taught her daughter needlework and lace making, who showed her how to design a pattern and create sumptuous embroidery. It was also Cornelia who read books with her and told her stories.

  Alice raises her head and contemplates the small, oval picture hanging over her desk: a colorized photograph of Cornelia as a little girl, four years old at most. A sweet child, still with baby fat and a much too serious face, a child who seems to look out at the world with suspicious eyes. You can see in this child, into whose chubby little baby hands the photographer had pressed a tendril of ivy and a couple of blue flowers, someone who shrinks back in fear from life. Only in her later years, when she was already a grandmother herself, did Cornelia grow stronger. Alice’s gaze wanders to the large photograph hanging on the other wall: Cornelia as an older woman, in her severe widow’s clothing. Cornelia still had the same serious look that she had as a little girl.

  Alice Frank’s mother, Cornelia Stern née Cahn, as a child, circa 1844 (photo credit 1.6)