Anne Frank's Family

by Mirjam Pressler

  Then, in 1942, no more news reached them: the time of letters was over, for a long while to come. The family, who were used to hearing about everyone, suddenly didn’t hear anything. Apparently, no one on Herbstgasse learned that Robert was among the hundreds of German Jews sent to prison on the Isle of Man that summer by the English government, “in the interest of national security.” It took his wife, Lotti, weeks to find out where he was being held, and several months before he was released and allowed to return home.

  Instead of family news reaching Herbstgasse from London or Amsterdam, there arrived only reports of deportations of Dutch Jews to the infamous camps in the East whose names were gradually becoming known: Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Theresienstadt. At the same time, rumors reached Basel that countless Dutch Jews had gone into hiding to avoid deportation. They heard nothing on Herbstgasse about Otto, Edith, and the children, but they knew Otto, knew how prudent and foresighted he was. If anyone could manage to keep himself and his family safe, it was Otto. But doubts and fears must have remained. How was it for them? How did they live with uncertainty, not only about Otto, Edith, Margot, and Anne’s fates, but also about Robert and Lotti, since the Germans had not stopped bombing London?

  Jean-Michel Frank, circa 1925 (photo credit 7.1)

  As brutal as it might sound, people get used to everything. And they calm themselves, they convince themselves that everything is okay, they build walls of straw to protect themselves against the dangerous outside world. People flee from a reality that they cannot or do not want to imagine into a daily routine which presses into the foreground all too easily with its demands. Of course they did not forget their loved ones—son, brother, brother-in-law, uncle, and his wife and daughters, the granddaughters, nieces, cousins. They thought about them, but not every minute of the day. Everyday life went on, and this everyday life, even in neutral Switzerland, was hard enough and growing harder all the time. In the end, you couldn’t simply sit around all day and wait for the mailman if he was never going to bring anything, day after day and week after week—at some point you stop waiting.

  Everyone in the family agreed that Otto’s last card to Leni, with the early birthday wishes, was a hint that “we in Amsterdam” were looking for a place to hide and therefore would no longer be able to “correspond with I. and with you all … She must understand.” And they did understand it, because they had no choice. Then, in 1943, came a letter from the Dutch Opekta Company. Johannes Kleiman, an old friend of Otto Frank’s and the current head of the company, wrote a formal letter that was limited to purely business matters. But a comment surfaced that led to long discussions in the house on Herbstgasse: “Our ‘little girl’ has meanwhile gotten as tall as my wife, we can hardly believe it.” Kleiman didn’t have any young daughters anymore—his children were all grown, and they knew that. In that case, was this comment a secret hint about Anne? And if so, did this other sentence mean that the Franks were getting enough to eat in their hiding place and so were healthy? “Although there are difficulties everywhere in keeping house during the war, we do not suffer from serious shortages of anything essential and everyone is altogether in good health.” And what about “Not one of us caught cold this winter?” Did that mean the Opekta employees, or Kleiman and his wife, or did it mean Otto, Edith, Margot, and Anne? They believed the latter—or they told themselves that that’s what it meant for so long that in the end they believed it. Here, too, they had no other choice.

  Letter from Johannes Kleiman to Erich Elias, May 12, 1943 (photo credit 7.2)

  Life went on, and for Erich and Leni other problems came to the fore. Their sons, Stephan and Buddy, were growing up and required a lot of care and attention, and the economic situation was not exactly rosy. Then there were worries about Paul, Erich’s brother. Erich and Leni tried everything to get him a travel permit to Switzerland, but in vain. Buddy recalls: “Somehow Paul could flee to France. There he managed to get hold of a visa for Bolivia, I don’t know how. But he wasn’t allowed to go from France to Bolivia, it was only possible via Switzerland. We applied to the authorities here so that he could transit through Switzerland; there would be no financial burden on the country whatsoever, we would pay everything. But they denied it, and gave as their reason that the continuation of his journey was not guaranteed.” Switzerland rejected all the applications in this matter, as they did the applications of many other Jews, apparently for fear of being “overrun by foreigners.” In cases like this as well, the disgraceful politics of the time continued to follow the “boat is full” principle.

  Johanna Elias, circa 1911 (photo credit 7.4)

  Grandma Ida was in despair. She had had three children, and only Erich was left. Her daughter, Johanna, had been a beautiful girl, and there were still a few photographs of her in the house on Herbstgasse. She had fallen in love with a Christian military officer and had let him seduce her. But when Johanna became pregnant, the officer was not willing to marry a Jew and simply abandoned her. An everyday story, one might say, the kind you hear about all the time. But for Johanna it was the end of the world, and she took her own life in 1911, when she was eighteen years old.

  Grandma Ida and Erich never kept this story a secret; they always spoke openly about Johanna and her unhappy fate.

  So Ida had already lost one child, and now she was tormented with fears about a second, her son Paul. With every refusal from the immigration police, she grew more silent and cleaned house more furiously. How justified her fears were came to light only after the war: Paul Elias was murdered at Auschwitz.

  The family also had to worry about Herbert. Erich and Leni tried to get him a residence permit, and there is a letter to the Jewish welfare authorities from January 18, 1943, pertaining to the matter, in which the undersigned, “Mrs. Alice Frank-Stern and Mr. Erich Elias-Frank,” guarantee “to be responsible in every sense” for the support of their son and brother-in-law Mr. Herbert Frank “and to see to his emigration elsewhere from Switzerland by whatever means are possible.” A handwritten note at the bottom of the document says: “To Herr Gretschel, requesting him to determine whether this counter-guarantor will be sufficient for obtaining a guarantee from the immigration police.”

  Apparently, it was sufficient for the immigration police. But it might also be the case that Herbert Frank, by that point made stateless like other German Jews abroad, entered Switzerland with false papers, because among the cache of documents in Basel there is a carte d’identité with Herbert’s photograph but made out in the name of his dead cousin Jean-Michel Frank, a French citizen.

  Herbert stayed in the house on Herbstgasse for two and a half years—letters and a handwritten autobiographical statement (“1942–1945 in Basel”) are proof—and he left Switzerland to return to France only after the end of the war.

  Leni had further worries about feeding the family. In 1943 she moved out of her “flea market” into a real store on Spalenvorstadt, on the corner of Schützenmattstrasse, where she began to sell antique furniture as well as used clothing, shoes, lamps, and all sorts of odds and ends. Many emigrants were forced to sell their furniture, including valuable antiques, which they had stored somewhere—either to raise necessary money or because they were emigrating farther and could not or would not bring it with them. These individuals now turned directly to Leni, if they were already in Switzerland, or wrote her letters and asked her, if sending their belongings onward was not practical, to take care of the stored items and sell them. It was no longer possible to conduct the business from the room in lower Basel and she had hired an assistant, since her activities had grown too extensive to manage alone. Leni had turned into a businesswoman, to the extent that she could. Her methods were unconventional—she had never owned a cash register, but always sorted the money coming in into envelopes bearing the names of the respective owners—but one way or another it seemed to work for her, and of course she also had Erich to help with the bookkeeping.

  There is a story about Leni that seems typ
ical of her. Gerti, her daughter-in-law who later worked in the business with Leni, told it: One day, Gerti said, two newlyweds showed up in the store—two students who wanted to furnish their first apartment and were actually just looking for a little wardrobe. They came across a set of china and were sad that they couldn’t buy it, but it was far beyond their means. Leni listened to them talk for a while, then interrupted them and said: “You can have the dishes, just pay me when you have the money.” The couple came with a little handcart, packed the china on it, and quietly took it away to their apartment. It took a year, Gerti said, before they started to pay off the dishes in monthly installments of just a few francs each, and by the time they were done paying for them, they had already had their second child. “That’s how Leni was,” Gerti says. “And despite that, she somehow managed to earn what the family needed.”

  French carte d’identité in Jean-Michel Frank’s name, with a photograph of his German cousin Herbert (photo credit 7.3)

  Even in the bad years, Leni persisted in her Wednesday afternoon bridge games and in inviting people over to eat. According to Buddy, she always said about people whom she didn’t like, in a light Frankfurt accent, “I hope he doesn’t let the door hit him on the way out,” and about people whom she found sympathetic, “He can come to eat.” Many people did. Buddy remembers that Wilhelm Herzog, an art history and literary scholar almost forgotten today, was a regular guest at the house on Herbstgasse as an emigrant. In the family, they called him “le duc.” Buddy remembers that another guest, “Ivor Gregoritsch or something like that,” worked at the Yugoslavian consulate, maybe even as vice-consul, in any case he was there every Saturday for the boiled beef. He sat at the table and waited for Erich to slice the meat. Erich always found something to criticize about it—sometimes it was too fatty, sometimes too lean—and then Ivo would start to grumble until Erich said: It isn’t that bad, I didn’t mean it. “We liked him a lot,” Buddy says. “Then he went back to Yugoslavia and we never heard from him again, unfortunately. During the whole war we always had guests who came to eat with us, refugees.”

  Leni couldn’t cook, everyone knew that. It was all the more surprising to Gerti when she heard her mother-in-law say years later that she had once graduated from cooking school. “When I asked her why she went,” Gerti says, “she answered that it was normal in her youth. That’s how girls from good families were prepared to be married. She showed me her cookbook with countless handwritten recipes, full of pride. But she never cooked. Later she came into the kitchen a few times and asked me to show her how to cook. I tried to teach her a couple of things, but after just a minute or two she suddenly remembered that she had forgotten to take care of something extremely urgent. And that was that.” But even if she had known how, she would not have had any time to cook, since she spent her days at the business and often overextended herself as it was.

  Leni’s Sunday tea parties were famous, and she carefully chose the guests to invite. The large table in the dining room was pulled out so that there was room to seat twenty people at it, and Leni set the table herself—at that, she was a master. Marvelous lace tablecloths that Alice had made went onto the table, then porcelain china that came from Cornelia, and silverware from Elkan Juda Cahn, silver candlesticks, and flowers.

  Vreni served tea and snacks, nothing grand, in fact quite modest given the magnificently laid table. When the two silver teapots, on a silver tea tray with a matching sugar bowl, were empty, Leni pulled on the bell that was attached to the light fixture above the middle of the table and Vreni came to refill them. Many emigrants would have felt themselves transported back to a time that they thought had been long forgotten, which no doubt gave rise to various melancholy remarks over the years.

  And of course there were conversations at the table: that was what one did, among cultured people; one belonged to the upper middle class, and one put one’s social position on display even if it was more like the position one used to have, in earlier times.

  Probably they talked mostly about their families. And of course they sometimes competed with their stories, started to brag a bit. Alice might have said: “My cousin, Dr. Alfred Stern, was Albert Einstein’s professor in Zurich, yes, yes, Albert Einstein, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. My cousin stayed in contact with Einstein later too, I’ve seen letters from this famous man with my own eyes.”

  “So many of the German Nobel Prize winners were Jewish,” someone remarks, and then the names are counted off: Richard Willstätter, Fritz Haber, Gabriel Lippmann, Alfred Fried, Paul Ehrlich, Otto Meyerhof … Everyone nods, and some of their luster is reflected onto Jews in general and Alice and Leni in particular.

  “Does your cousin still live in Zurich?” someone else might ask, and Alice would answer: “No, he died in 1936, and none of his three daughters have married. None of them had any children, unfortunately.”

  And then everyone would start to talk about relatives they were worried about, or relatives they wished were a little more worried about them. At some point the conversation would turn to Holland, of course, as it always eventually did to every European country where there were relatives.

  “I’m glad I got out in time, right after the invasion,” someone might say, perhaps the nephew of an old established Basel Jewish family—a strong young man who was up to fleeing over the Vosges Mountains to France and thence to Basel. His doctorate of law was of course worth nothing here in Switzerland.

  “My brother is still there,” Leni says. “He’s gone underground.” “Underground”—a new word, in this sense, which the refugees from Holland have brought. It comes easily to Leni’s lips now. “At least we think he went underground with his family.”

  And so the conversation was back on the topic that everyone actually would have rather avoided in a social situation like this. “Where can people hide there?” Alice asks. “Dutch buildings don’t even have basements. And what happens if someone gets sick? Or gets a toothache?”

  The jurist shrugs his shoulders. “It’s definitely not easy for people who go underground, or for their helpers. And they say the Germans pay seven and a half marks for every Jew in hiding to the person who betrays them.” He pauses meaningfully, long enough to let anyone who wants to call to mind the thirty pieces of silver, then continues: “There are more than enough Dutch who are willing to do it. Then the captured Jews all go to Westerbork and are sent on to Poland, to the camps. And Westerbork used to be a refugee camp for Jews from Germany; back then, it was even paid for by the Jewish communities in the Netherlands.”

  At this point, if not sooner, Alice stands up and leaves the room, and her footsteps can be heard on the stairs—slow footsteps, for she has become an old woman.

  Leni knows that she will find her mother upstairs later in her room. She will be sitting there in the armchair, letters or photographs in her hand—letters from Margot and Anne that she rereads over and over again, and photographs she never stops looking at—and her eyes will be red and swollen.

  It is especially bad on birthdays. Alice doesn’t even come downstairs to eat, and Vreni has to carry up a tray for her. When Leni visits her later in the day, Alice shows her a photograph and says, on June 12, 1943, “Anne is turning fourteen today. I wonder how she looks now?” And on June 12, 1944: “Anne is turning fifteen today.” Or it is February 16, 1943, and she has a photograph of Margot in her hand: “Margot is turning seventeen today. When I was that age, I went to concerts and to the theater and already had suitors.” On January 16, 1943, she might say: “Today Edith is forty-three years old. She doesn’t deserve this, she’s still so young.”

  “It can’t last much longer,” Leni then says, because nothing else occurs to her to say and because she wants so badly to believe it herself. “We’ll definitely all be together again next year.”

  “That’s what you said last year, and the year before that too,” Alice says, and she starts to cry.

  Leni gives her mother a kiss and leaves her alone. Sh
e knows that consoling words do no good on days like this. The birthdays are the worst.

  Maybe she also pictured to herself how sad the birthdays must have been in their hiding place, and wondered if there was any way anyone could come up with a present for the birthday girl. At the very least Otto would have written his daughter a poem—he had always liked writing poems, like all the children in the family.

  And in fact, among the cache of documents that was found in the attic on Herbstgasse, a poem was discovered that Otto wrote for his wife Edith’s forty-third birthday. The poem was probably one of the few items left behind in the Secret Annex, like the photographs on the wall and of course Anne’s diary. Otto must have brought the poem to the house on Herbstgasse when he moved there later, because it was bound up with his memories of his murdered wife, Edith. Here is the poem:

  No flowers, no smoked herring,

  No pastries, not one earring,

  No stockings, no tasty treat,

  Not even a little sweet—

  No bonbons, no chocolate

  No cookies from Verkade1

  Nothing to read, nothing to wear: