Anne Frank's Family

by Mirjam Pressler

Enough for today, it is all still too upsetting for me, the main thing is that the children turn up again. I have to be patient. Write soon. Many 1000s of hugs and kisses

  Your Otto

  One can only imagine how they reacted to this letter on Herbstgasse, how they went over every last point, how they blamed themselves for having lived in such comparative comfort while Otto, Edith, and the children had had to suffer so much. But he was alive, Otto was alive. Leni would have asked, “Why did he write that Edith ‘passed away,’ why did he write that she ‘didn’t suffer’?” But to protect her mother, she probably asked the question only after Alice had withdrawn to her room. The doctor had said that her heart was strong, but she was after all almost eighty years old. And presumably, Leni answered her own question: “He wanted to soften the blow for Alice, he wanted to give I. the impression that Edith had simply died.” And Erich, who was tormented by constant worrying about his own brother and who may have been able to imagine Otto’s feelings better than Leni could, might have said: “Or himself. Maybe he wanted to talk himself into it. It must be easier to remember someone who just died than someone who you know was tortured and starved to death.”

  The next evening, Alice wrote a letter to her son that he would only receive much later. She read it out loud to the family before putting it in the envelope.

  My dearest Ottel, There are no words to say what I felt when we read your letter from the steamship Monowai! We had no idea what a horrific fate had befallen you all & imagined you all together even though we kept hearing with horror from the newspapers & the radio everything that was happening. We totally misunderstood yr first telegraph & thought “partons” meant the family! not a transport, which we had no idea about. What a dreadful mistake & what a blow for me & for all of us here! We tried right away but couldn’t reach you by telegr. & it’s only today I got your address in Amsterdam from Robert! To know that you are alone in your grief for Edith and with no news of the dear children is probably the most horrible thing I have ever felt in my whole life with all its difficult moments. How Edith must have suffered without you & the children, I don’t dare to even think about it, & here we all were with no idea! We never got any news from Kattowitz, but still through the whole time when we didn’t hear anything my thoughts were with you every single day and my deepest wishes & hopes which now alas I see were not fulfilled. We have submitted a search request to the international Red Cross in Geneva & the consulate here, and we spoke with Dr. Iller today, who unfortunately had no advice for us and is also without any news of his relatives & his mother. The fate of so many of our friends & acquaintances is so terrible, but how you suffer in your heart when it’s about your own flesh & blood is indescribable. And after all the suffering in body and soul you’ve been through the uncertainty about the whereabouts of the girls is the worst of all! I sincerely mourn for Edith with you—she was such a great support in your life & the girls’ best friend & tireless mother. If only I could be with you & tell you all the love I feel for you. It wouldn’t help, but it would be a consolation for me, to see you & be with you. My strength would be enough for that & you would at least feel that you have your mother with you, and you couldn’t even know if you would ever see her again! I am in constant contact with Julius and Walter, it was a serious and difficult decision to send them a copy of your letter but I couldn’t keep it from them either. They will suffer terribly from the news … Herbie was with us for 2½ years & very dear company for all of us, we miss him very much & he telegr’d in despair when we told him the news about you all! His address is still Hotel d’Edinbourg, rue d’Edinbourg 8, Paris 8ieme. We will send him your address today so he can get in touch with you right away. Helen [Schuster] is in Paris for now & also hoped so much to see you, but what are hopes & wishes worth! Leni is writing to you separately, and the Schneiders, whom we see very often. You’ve probably already seen Mr. Kleiman, Mr. Kugler, & the loving women who were so ready to help you? & where are you staying? There’s so much we want to know, but the main thing is everything about you & if you really feel healthy & how your nerves are holding up to do everything in your power to find the children. Letters back and forth to Holland seem to be very slow and unreliable so I am sending this registered to try to be sure that you get it. Goodbye for today, I say it with a heavy heart & I want to tell you again & again how warmly I & everyone here are thinking of you & want to support you & help you in your unspeakable suffering. Don’t lose hope & courage, my dearest Ottel, & know for sure that I’m holding you with all my love in my heart. Your Mother.

  Erich told Leni when he came home one evening a couple days later that he had written to Otto as well. A postcard, because people said it was better to write postcards, they got past the various censors more easily. The censors were a great hassle, everyone agreed, but people also understood that the victorious nations had to control what went through the mail. They must have been concerned that the German capitulation was only a pretense; it certainly seemed unlikely that everyone would be reconciled to having lost the war. There might still be pockets of resistance somewhere, or plans being made in secret against the occupying forces, sabotage conspiracies, murder plots. Erich said he wrote the card in French, which was definitely more innocuous and would get through the censors more easily—German was, after all, the language of the ones who had started the war and were responsible for the whole mess, you couldn’t know how whoever it was whose hands the postcard fell into would react.

  “What did you say?” Leni asked.

  “I said how horrified we were and how much we hope he will find the children again soon. I also gave him Herbert’s address in France and gave him some suggestions that might be useful for making a fresh start in business.”

  “It’s not about a fresh start in his business,” Leni said. “All that matters is the children.”

  “But you have to live on something,” Erich countered. “And the situation in Holland is terrible, everyone who knows about it says so. The Germans plundered the country, there’s nothing left, the stores are empty. You heard what this man just said about the Hunger Winter there, lots of people simply starved to death. They said people were grinding up tulip bulbs for flour to make bread.”

  Even though Otto had not written any details about his time in Auschwitz, enough information about the Nazi death machine was circulating by then that the family on Herbstgasse could imagine what Otto had lived through while they had thought he was safe in hiding. Leni clearly saw in her mind’s eye the images from the weekly newsreels, and when she thought about her brother, she pictured those skeletal figures. When she wrote to him on June 22, 1945, these pictures were still haunting her:

  Now that Robbie has given us your Amsterdam address I want to try to write a few words to you. You can be sure that all of us will do everything in our power to learn news of the children, I’ve now tried going through diplomatic channels too. But everything goes at a snail’s pace—except for the atrocities of these German villains! To just sit here, unable to help you & powerless, is probably the worst thing—we just hadn’t heard anything & had hoped that you would be spared, to some extent, since it was okay until 1944. Poor, dear, good Ottel, what did we do to deserve being spared? It was sheer luck. No letter has reached us from Holland until now … We can’t even imagine your life there & please please tell us what you need—more and more people are going to Holland and they could bring you things. Can you get a hold of anyone in America? And, I hardly dare ask, can you come here to us?? Everything I’m writing is so stupid, ach, Ottel, maybe you can feel what I can’t get down on paper the way I want to!! Mom can much better than I can. It was great having Herbi here for 21⁄2 years & he was a great help to me. It was especially hard for Mom when he left. But none of that matters, all we want is to help you find your children & is that really true about poor Edith? There’s no trace of Paul & there are millions of other people whose relatives are looking for them.

  Otto’s answer was a long time coming.
Alice grew more and more impatient every day, and Leni didn’t know how to calm her mother. Again and again Alice said that she wanted to go to Amsterdam and see her son, hold him in her arms.

  “It’s just not possible,” Erich said. “We have no passports, we can’t just get on a train and go.”

  “Maybe Otto can come here,” Buddy suggested.

  His father shook his head. “Otto is just as stateless as we are,” he argued. “None of us are Germans anymore.”

  “I’m glad,” Stephan said. “I want to be Swiss, I don’t want to be a German.”

  “Maybe the Netherlands is different from Switzerland,” Buddy said. “Maybe they’ll just give their Jews who come back from the camps citizenship, it could be.”

  “Maybe,” Erich said, but you could see that he didn’t believe it himself.

  And Leni said: “Well, the Netherlands couldn’t be worse than here, Switzerland is the worst. I’m sure Otto will be naturalized there soon.”

  That was not how it turned out. The Netherlands, where so many people had helped the Jews and often risked their lives for them, turned out to be in no way willing to welcome the returning survivors with open arms after the war—never mind that only a few returned, around 5,200 out of the roughly 107,000 who were deported.3 In addition, there was a state of emergency after the war in the Netherlands, with economic recovery still years away. When Otto wrote that he had no raincoat, no hat, no watch, and no shoes, aside from what other people had lent him, that was only the barest hint of the universal shortages: they had neither enough to eat nor enough places to live. Otto was actually very lucky to have been taken in by Miep and Jan Gies.

  Of course they didn’t know that in Basel, but they did hear one thing or another from the people who had managed to make it from the Netherlands to Switzerland. They heard about returning survivors who found strangers living in their apartments who refused to move out, and about others who had given their friends their valuables before being deported—not true friends, as it turned out, since they suddenly didn’t remember anything about any valuables. It was reassuring to know that Otto’s helpers seemed to be true friends who helped and supported him.

  So life went on in Basel. Buddy had finished his acting school and was hoping for his first role. There was no word from Otto, except for that one letter. Mrs. Belinfante, an acquaintance, was planning to travel to Amsterdam and said she could take letters and presents for Otto. Alice complained in her letter of July 6 that she couldn’t picture Otto’s life there, and how he was bearing his life without Edith and the children. The hope of finding the girls again soon must be sustaining him. She said there was still no word from Edith’s brothers Julius and Walter either. Then she said that they were in a similar situation on Herbstgasse, since they hadn’t heard anything about Erich’s brother, Paul. As with Margot and Anne, every possible step was being taken to look for Paul, but unfortunately with no results so far. And she wrote that while she was knitting the sweater that she would pass along to Mrs. Belinfante, she had not once stopped thinking about him, Otto. She had already started the socks, hoping that she would be able to give them to him herself.

  In the same letter, Leni wrote:

  Dearest Ottel, Mrs. Belinfante, a magnificent woman, will give you this letter as soon as she possibly can & I hope that you can talk with her a little. Our thoughts are with you every minute & only hope is sustaining us all here. How much I’d love to be there for you, but this terrible world has not gotten any better & even though we’re not really that far apart from each other in miles, almost impossibly high barriers are separating us. We can’t even reach you by letter or by phone! But I’m sure that it’s only a matter of time. Just try to send us a few lines with one of the Kindertransports4 to Switzerland! If I didn’t have my work, I couldn’t possibly bear it—This powerlessness over everything! So, dear brother, warmest kisses from your old Lunni.

  Buddy, just twenty years old, wanted to write to Otto too, but felt that he couldn’t. “Anything you write is so horribly shallow, compared to what he’s been through,” he said.

  “So what,” Leni countered. “He should know that you’re thinking of him. You could tell him, for instance, what your final exams at acting school were like, Otto always liked the theater.” And when she saw Buddy’s uncertain face, she added: “It doesn’t matter what you write, the main thing is that he get a letter from you.”

  So Buddy wrote to his “dearest Ottel”:

  After all these years of horrible uncertainty about your fate, the certainty has turned out to be just as horrible. Our thoughts are with you as always and your dear Edith will live on in our hearts. All of our hopes are focused on Margot and Anne’s return. We mustn’t give up hope until their safe return, or until there is certain news that they are not alive, but we don’t even want to think about that. Well, now that the terrible times are basically over, better times will come for you as well. I know that it’s easy for me to say “Chin up!” and hard for you, but that’s why it’s so important. Sometimes I’m simply ashamed when I think about how we’ve lived here in Basel during the years of your martyrdom—never once leaving the table hungry, just doing our work and enjoying our pleasures; the fact is, aside from constant air raids (with no bombings), minor rationing, and some artillery fire from Alsace, we haven’t felt the war at all. We had no idea how lucky we were. And it’s just as impossible for us to picture the afflictions you were living through. There are lots of horrifying reports in the papers and we see pictures in the American newsreel of the horrifying “extermination camps.” But sitting in our plush seats watching a few terrible pictures on the screen there is still no way we can imagine what life i.e. languishing in that hell was really like.

  Anyway, I do want to write and tell you a little about myself. You’ll definitely be interested in what I’m up to. I finished my acting school three weeks ago and now I’m an actor. I’ve wanted this career from when I was a little boy. The final performance, which was a test at the end of my course of study to see what I could do in various scenes and roles, was a great success for me. I played the following roles in individual scenes from the following plays: 1) The First Gravedigger in Hamlet. 2) Vansen in Egmont. 3) Fabian in Twelfth Night. 4) Sosias in Kleist’s Amphitryon (my greatest success!). 5) Arnold Kramer in Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer. At the moment I’m in negotiations with two Swiss theaters for an engagement for next season. Last winter my Comedy on Ice routine was a success on all the skating rinks in Switzerland—my partner and I appeared as “Buddy and Baddy.” My stage name is probably going to be “Elias Frank.” We’re not Swiss citizens yet, Steph and I very much want to be and will keep trying to get citizenship. The requirements are unbelievably strict. At the moment I’m studying typing and English. I want to visit you, and Robbie and Herbi, as soon as I can, of course. But obviously we expect you to come here to see us before that, and hopefully soon! Come as soon as you can. Well, I have to stop for today, 1000s of hugs and kisses from Your, Buddy.

  Then there followed a few lines from Stephan expressing his sympathy:

  How much you must have suffered and must still be suffering. But you have to build a new life for yourself, in spite of the pain you feel in your soul. If only we could help the rebuilding a little! It is nice to be with someone today who will see you and talk to you soon. Mrs. Belinfante will be able to tell you the important things about us.

  Buddy Elias and Otti Rehorek as “Buddy and Baddy” on the ice (photo credit 8.2)

  Leni gave Mrs. Belinfante these letters, along with presents for Otto, and settled down to a long wait. It must have seemed to her by that point that her whole life was practically nothing but waiting. Then, suddenly, the postcards arrived at Herbstgasse that Otto had written in February and March: from Auschwitz, from Kattowitz, from Czernowitz. And only a day later came Otto’s letter of June 15, the letter in which he enclosed a copy of Lien Brilleslijper’s testimony about the fate of his children. It was a cruel and terrible coin
cidence.

  They read the letters and card that Otto had written right after the liberation. They had learned by that point that Auschwitz had been liberated on January 27, 1945; they knew that over a million people had met their deaths there, most of them killed with poison gas, Zyklon B, and that along with the corpses more than seven thousand survivors had been found. And that one of the survivors had been Otto Frank, their son, brother, brother-in-law, uncle. His first postcard came from Auschwitz itself, written on the back of a blank form with regulations from the camp commander.

  “Look at these regulations,” Erich said bitterly. “What cynicism! They act as if Auschwitz was a place where the prisoners had any rights, as though they weren’t being brought there to be exterminated.”

  Then he turned the letter over. “Dearest Mom,” he read out loud.

  Hopefully this letter will reach you and give you and all our loved ones the news that the Russians have saved me, I’m healthy and in good spirits and well taken care of in every way. I don’t know where Edith and the children are, we were separated on Sept. 5, ’44. I heard only that they were transported to Germany. We have to hope that we’ll get them back healthy. Please tell my in-laws and my friends in Holland that I’m safe. I can’t wait to see you all again and I hope that it will be possible soon. If only all of you are safe and sound. When will I be able to get news from you? All my love and warmest hugs and kisses,

  Your son Otto

  The sender’s name and information were written on the letter: “Otto Frank, born May 12, 1889, Pris. #B9174.” Leni felt a chill run up her spine. She guessed that this number must mean that they had tattooed her brother’s left arm when he arrived at Auschwitz. She had seen pictures of these numbers, and she would see many more people with those numbers in future. Alice started to cry. “He didn’t know anything about Edith’s death yet.”