Letter from Otto Frank to his mother, Alice, on stationery from the Auschwitz concentration camp, February 23, 1945 (photo credit 8.3)
No, he hadn’t known anything about Edith’s death at the time. In his next letter, too, from Kattowitz, he still spoke of his hope to find Edith and the children again.
I still can’t bring myself to describe all my experiences at length, the main thing you want to know is that I am alive & well. You will understand how much it tortures me not to know where Edith and the children are. But I still hope to see them all safe and sound, and I don’t want to let myself get depressed.… I can hardly imagine normal life and don’t want to think about the future yet. I am a beggar here and look like one too … I will always be grateful to the Russians for the liberation. If I hadn’t been taken to a hospital—I was weak and weighed 52 kg [less than 115 lb.]—there is no way I would still be alive. I was lucky & I had good friends. Peter van Pels, who was with us in hiding in Amsterdam for 2 years, was like a son and did everything to help me. Every day he brought me extra food. And what our Amsterdam friends—Miep Gies, Kleiman, Kugler, Bep—did to take care of us, despite the danger, while we were in hiding, we can never repay it. The Gestapo arrested Kleiman & Kugler with us and they ended up in a concentration camp too. The thought of that is a constant torment to me, I can only hope that they are free by now. In case you can correspond with Amsterdam, send news.…
Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and Bep Voskuijl were the employees of Otto Frank’s company who had taken care of the Frank and van Pels families and Dr. Pfeffer during their two years in hiding, at great risk and sacrifice. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl had taken on the difficult task of obtaining the necessary food, which was extremely difficult with the wartime rationing. But all four, it goes without saying, were absolutely necessary helpers without whom it would not have been possible for the Franks and the others to go underground. They belong to that category of people who act humanely in inhuman times. Jan Gies, the man Miep had married in 1941, is in that category as well. Leni knew these helpers—she had met each and every one of them when she had visited the Franks in Amsterdam before the war. Alice knew them too. “May God repay what they did for Otto, Edith, and the children,” Alice said. “We can’t.”
In the next letter from Otto, also sent from Kattowitz, it said:
I can’t write much, I just got the news of Edith’s death on 1/6/45, and it has hit me so hard that I am not entirely my old self. Only the thought of the children keeps me going. Edith died in the hospital, she was too weak from malnutrition to withstand the intestinal problems that came up. In truth, another German murder. If she could have held out only two more weeks then the Russians would have liberated her too and it all would have turned out differently.
“If she could have held out only two more weeks,” Leni repeated Otto’s words, in shock.
It was true for so many: if only they could have held out just a little longer … Later they would learn that for Peter van Pels—who, Otto wrote, had done everything to help him, “like a son”—just one or two more days would have been enough. He survived one of the most infamous death marches only to die in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria on May 5, 1945, the very day it was liberated by the American soldiers. He was not quite nineteen years old.
On still another card that Otto sent from Kattowitz, he told them that he was waiting for transportation back to Holland, but no one knew when it would happen. “It looks like the war ended in a hurry. I am healthy and doing all right, in spite of the sad news of my wife’s death. As long as I find the children.”
Then there was a card from Czernowitz, dated April 11, with only the information that their transport had brought them there and that they were hoping to be able to continue to Amsterdam soon.
“The war was still going on on April 11,” Buddy might have said. “In the rest of Europe battles were still taking place and bombs were still falling. There’s no way they’d be able to keep traveling anytime soon.”
They looked at each other, torn inside between their grief over Edith, worry about the children, and happiness that Otto had survived the horrors.
The next day came the fateful letter with the news that both children, Margot and Anne, were dead, that they had died months before in a German concentration camp. Just a few days before the letter arrived, Alice had written to Otto: “We are such a short distance apart & yet so separated from each other & we need to be with each other so badly.” And Leni had asked: “Can’t you try to come here to us? But of course you still need to wait until you learn further details—it’s all so horrible, we can’t even think reasonably about it.” The realization that Otto already knew of the death of his children when he read these lines was now unbearable for Leni. At the same time, Leni also had to worry about her mother—she was afraid that Alice would not be able to survive this turn of fate.
The search for the missing was an urgent concern for many people in the months after the end of the war. Everywhere in Europe, people were desperate for a sign of life from their loved ones; people everywhere were waiting for a miracle. For years after the end of the war, there was a special office of the Red Cross to handle search requests, and sometimes—but rarely—the miracle really happened. One of the people waiting for news of her relatives was Fritzi Geiringer, originally from Vienna. In Auschwitz she was separated from her husband and son, and she and her daughter, Eva, the same age as Anne Frank, had survived. Otto met Fritzi on the long voyage back to Amsterdam and eight years later he would marry her.
Otto tirelessly asked everyone he met who had returned from the camps if they knew anything about his daughters. He read the lists that the newspapers published, and inquired at the Red Cross again and again, where they kept a list of the survivors and collected eyewitness testimony about the victims.
It was a terrible time of waiting to see who would come back—who might have managed to escape death when everyone had thought they were gone. A time of hopes, of rumors, of suppositions, and of horrible certainties. Finally, on July 18, 1945, Otto found out what had happened to his children. On a list at the Red Cross he discovered the names Margot Betti Frank and Annelies Marie Frank, with the fateful cross after their names. And he obtained the name and address of the woman who had made that report.
The doubts that Otto must have long had were now certain. He informed his family and included a translation of the testimony that Lien Brilleslijper had given—she and her sister Jannie had been in Bergen-Belsen and had met Margot and Anne there.
After we had something to eat, we found a faucet where we could wash up a little, which we hadn’t been able to do since Auschwitz. We wrapped ourselves up in our blankets again. Then we saw two thin, bald figures that looked like freezing baby birds. We fell into each other’s arms and cried. It was Margot and Anne Frank. We asked them about their mother. Anne said: “Selected.”
Then the four of us went past the barracks to the parade ground. We saw several big tents there. They looked like circus tents. We were assigned to one of them and lay down on the straw. We cuddled up with each other under our blankets. The first few days were peaceful, we slept a lot. Then it started to rain. Even under our blankets we could not get warm. And there were the lice too.
Then we were called up to work. We had to tear the soles off of old shoes. For that, we got some soup and a little piece of bread. Soon our hands started to bleed and got infected. Anne and I had to stop first, Jannie and Margot were able to keep going a bit longer.
After a few days, heavy winter storms started. The tents couldn’t withstand the storms and fell apart. There were wounded people. We were herded into a shed where rags and old shoes and other things like that were stored. Anne asked: “Why do they want us to live like animals?” Jannie answered: “Because they are man-eating wild animals themselves.”
One day, in December, we received a tiny piece of cheese and some jam. The S.S. and the female guards went away to celebr
ate. It was Christmas. We were three pairs of sisters: us, Margot and Anne Frank, and the Daniel sisters. We wanted to celebrate St. Nicholas Day, Hanukkah, and Christmas in our own way. Jannie had met some Hungarian girls who worked in the S.S. kitchen. With their help we got two handfuls of potato peels. Anne managed to get a hold of a stick of celery. The Daniel sisters found some red beets. I sang and danced for some guards and got a handful of sauerkraut. We had saved our bread, and with all this together we made a surprise present for the others. We roasted the potato peels and quietly sang Dutch and Yiddish songs, and imagined what we would do if we ever got home. Anne’s idea was: “Then we’ll have a party, a celebratory meal at Dikker & Thys,” one of Amsterdam’s most expensive restaurants. For a little while we were almost happy.
Then Jannie and I were assigned to another barrack. We asked Anne and Margot to come with us, but Margot had terrible diarrhea and had to stay in the old barrack because of the risk of stomach typhus. Anne took care of her as well as she could. We visited them during the next few weeks and now and then we were able to bring them something to eat.
It must have been March when we went to see them again, the snow had melted. But they weren’t in the barrack anymore. We found them in the sick house. We told them they mustn’t stay there, because whenever you gave up hope the end was near. Anne said: “Here we can both lie on one bunk, we are together, and it’s peaceful.” Margot could only whisper. She had a high fever. The next day we went to visit them again. Margot had fallen out of the bunk and was barely conscious. Anne had a fever too, she was friendly and sweet. She said: “Margot will sleep well and when she sleeps I won’t need to get up again.”
A few days later we found their bunk empty. We knew what that meant. We found them behind the barrack, wrapped their thin bodies in a blanket, and carried them to a mass grave. That was all we could do for them.
Lien Brilleslijper and her sister Jannie were deported first to Auschwitz, then, like Anne and Margot, to Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated by the British. Lien Rebling-Brilleslijper and her husband, Eberhard Rebling, a successful pianist and musicologist who had immigrated to Holland in 1936, later returned to Berlin, where she became a well-known performer of Yiddish songs and workmen’s ballads in East Germany.
She and her sister had survived the Holocaust, but Margot and Anne Frank had not.
* * *
1 Edith’s brothers, who had fled to America.
2 Actually, the Franks and the others living in the Secret Annex were arrested on August 4.
3 Wolfgang Benz, ed., Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der Jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus [Scale of the Genocide: The Number of Jewish Victims of National Socialism] (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1991), p. 165.
4 Between December 1938 and May 1940, Kindertransports (Children’s Transports) rescued thousands of Jewish children, sending them by train and ship to Britain for the duration of the war.
9.
You Can’t Let Yourself Get Depressed
Margot and Anne were dead. They presumably died in late March 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on the Lüneburg Heath. When British soldiers liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, they found approximately sixty thousand emaciated prisoners. The British military doctor who was later put in charge of the rescue and rehabilitation efforts, Hugh Llewelyn Glyn Hughes, described the situation like this: “The conditions in the camp were really indescribable; no description nor photograph could really bring home the horrors.… There were various sizes of piles of corpses lying all over the camp.… [The huts] were filled absolutely to overflowing with prisoners in every state of emaciation and disease.”1 The absolute overcrowding and utterly insufficient food and supplies in the camp had taken the lives of more than thirty-five thousand people between January and mid-April 1945 alone, including Margot and Anne Frank.
Alice reacted with shock to the death of her granddaughters, as is apparent in the letter that she wrote to Otto on August 4:
My dearest Otto, Your letter of 6/15 with the copy & 9 cards so far have reached us … There are no words to tell you what I feel & every minute I am with you in feeling the unspeakable suffering in body and soul that you now have to bear alone. We can’t even help you, me with my great love for you & with the unspeakable sorrow I share with you. I don’t want to & I can’t write about any details today, it’s beyond my strength, but it isn’t necessary either, is it, the facts are so horrible & nothing I could say about the facts could possibly show you how I feel. Maybe someday later I’ll be able to ask everything I want to know about Edith too but anyway now it’s all for nothing & you seem to be being brave, that’s the only thing I can hope & wish for now. Did you get my telegram, all it’s trying to say is that we have one thought now & that is you … Olga L. has come back from Theresienstadt, she seems to have partially lost her memory & is living in a home, she doesn’t know anything anymore about little Irma since she got to Birkenau. Sig. G. died in Theresienstadt, we haven’t had any news of Louis for months. I’m writing you about all this because you asked about everyone in one of your cards & they’re also so near and dear to us! I also just now got a nice card from Bep Voskeul & Helene. Both are so nice to write, I thank them & I’ll answer soon. I telegraphed Herbie, I also heard from Robert & Lotti yesterday, they didn’t know about our great loss. Lotti seemed completely “down.” Did you get their package yet & also see the Goldsteins, they had various things for you too.—If only I could be with you, but I’d still have no way to express our great pain, I could only put my head on your shoulder & cry! Stay healthy, send our love to everyone there, they were such faithful friends to you, & warmest thoughts as always from Your, Mom.
Joint letter from the family to Otto Frank, August 5, 1945 (photo credit 9.1)
Joint letter from the family to Otto Frank, August 5, 1945 (photo credit 9.2)
Everyone on Herbstgasse was completely stunned. The finality of the news left them nothing but helplessness and despair, especially Alice, who fell apart. Leni tried to be supportive, to give her courage. “Life goes on,” she said. “You always told us that we have to keep our sights set on the future.”
“What future?” Alice asked.
Leni wished she could take back her thoughtless words, because Alice was right, what future was there for her? She was almost eighty years old, and Otto was fifty-six. Was there still a future for him?
“We have to write to him,” Leni said at last. “Everyone needs to write to him. That is the only thing we can do for him—show him that he’s not alone in his suffering, that we’re by his side.”
The letter they all wrote to Otto demonstrates how great their grief was. They all expressed their sympathy, including Grandma Ida, who was affected by the news in a different way than the others, since it supplanted her worries about Paul for a time.
My dear Ottel,
We don’t need to say how very much you are in our thoughts in these difficult times. You are nevertheless forced to bear this great sorrow alone—all we can do is express our very deepest sympathy.—But I’m sure that you will work hard with your old energy and we will be able to see you again in the not so distant future.—The memory of our days in Amsterdam will stay in my memory for the rest of my life.
Wishing you all our love,
Your nephew Stephan
My dear Ottel,
I also want to write how terribly sorry I am about your horrible fate. I think I can say: our fate. I remember so well the lovely days with you and Margot in Adelboden. Edith and Anne are fixed in my memory as well, of course, and will be treasured there forever. I know that you have a hard battle ahead now, to recover from everything and make a fresh start. We can only give you so little support now, I wish you were here with us already, or we were with you. I’m positive that better times will come, for you too. You’ll do it. Chin up! See you very soon—
Your Buddy
Poor, dear Ottel,
Your sorrow, our sorrow, is so enormous that
I am almost speechless. I am shattered like never before in my life, and weep for the dear creatures who were your pride and joy and carried all of our hopes. I felt all your fears with you and now I feel the enormous grief with you too. Your sorrows are my own. I experienced your fears and unspeakable sorrows alongside you when I read your letters and dear Edith’s and the dear children’s sad end will stay engraved in my heart for the rest of my days. Their image will always be there before me. I am grateful to fate for keeping you here with us, and I wish you could be here with us now. We are with you in all of our thoughts and feelings.
Yours, Erich
Dear Otto! I want to tell you in just a few words, but all the more heartfelt, how deeply I feel for you & am affected by the horrific misfortune that has burst upon you. It is too terrible & there are no words to console you even a little bit, my dear Otto. We cannot think about anything else, it is too monstrous & the fate of these poor girls will never leave our memory. Keep your health now, also for your dear mother’s sake, so that we can finally see you again.
All love & best wishes from your Grandma Ida
They wrote their letter on August 5. This time, they did not have to wait such a long time for an answer: Otto’s letter is dated August 19. The postal service was up and running at last, though still irregular, which made it easier for the family to draw together—a need they must all have felt very strongly. Their tight family bonds were only strengthened by their shared sorrows. Otto Frank seemed to feel that way as well. He wrote:
My dears,
I received your family letter from the 6th and Leni’s card and I understand how hard it must have been for Mother to write to me. I have gotten so many letters from every side and I can’t answer everything at once. Besides, I’m trying not to think about things too much, but just stay busy. I mostly manage to do it and I am overcome with shock only every now and then. I already wrote that you have to try to summon me on business so that the consulate has support for my application, and after my conversation with Goldstein I am convinced that very extensive discussions are going to be necessary here if anyone is going to be able to rebuild what’s needed. More on that separately.
Anne Frank's Family Page 19