Anne Frank's Family

by Mirjam Pressler

  And the indestructibility of life.

  By then, Fritzi was seventy-five years old, Leni eighty-seven, Herbert eighty-nine, and Erich ninety. “Winter had finally come,” as Leni said, to Autumn Lane.

  19.

  A New Purpose in Life

  Leni had stopped working, and a manager was running Epoque. “But that doesn’t make any difference,” Leni said over and over to Gerti, “an employee is always just an employee, the owner has to be there in person. The customers expect personal treatment, and they’re right. It’s time for you to come and take over the business, Gerti, who should carry it on if not you?”

  Leni had grown old. With a paralyzed expression on her face, just as when her brother and older son had died four years before, she now absorbed the death of her husband, on October 2, 1984. Erich was in the hospital for an asthma attack. He was sitting on a chair in his silk bathrobe and having a lively conversation when suddenly he collapsed. The woman who was in his room rang for the nurse, and Erich was revived—successfully, but unfortunately. He lay in bed at home for a few more weeks, needing constant care, and then it was over.

  “To revive a ninety-three-year-old man,” Buddy said bitterly, “it’s irresponsible, it’s practically criminal. Especially for my father, who was always so elegant and distinguished, to give him the shame of needing diapers!” And Gerti repeated what François Fricker had said four years before, at Stephan’s funeral: “The common wisdom, that as long as there is life in a dying man there is hope and that we therefore have to extend a person’s life irrespective of its quality, can have consequences contrary to morality and human dignity.”

  Leni didn’t answer, she didn’t cry, she let Buddy and Patrick support her on the path to the cemetery and stared with her face unmoving as her husband’s coffin was lowered into the earth. They had been married for sixty-three years. Erich Elias, who had grown up in Zweibrücken, was now, like his mother-in-law, Alice Frank née Stern, and his mother, Ida Elias née Neu, buried in the Jewish cemetery in Basel.

  Gerti really did want to take over the business. It had long since been arranged; she and Buddy, after the many years of their wandering life, the frequent moves from one city to another, one apartment to another, longed to be truly at home. But they couldn’t move back to Switzerland as quickly as Leni would have liked. To prepare for her new life, Gerti took a distance-learning course in antiques in Berlin. She studied the characteristic features of various periods; learned how to distinguish different styles, painting techniques, materials; memorized the names of goldsmiths and silversmiths, manufacturers, and furniture makers; crammed lists of prices from auction catalogs. She passed her exams, which were far from easy, and slowly started to prepare their move to Switzerland.

  Leni and Erich Elias, circa 1983 (photo credit 18.4)

  Patrick, the older son, moved to Basel first, in 1985, right after his final exams. He wanted to act, but his parents, both actors, had advised him that it was better to learn a serious trade since an actor’s life was too dependent on chance—sometimes you have an engagement and sometimes you don’t, life as a banker would be much more secure. Patrick let himself be convinced, but in the end it didn’t work, and he would go to acting school and become an actor after all, like his younger brother, Oliver, too. Still, in the meantime, Patrick started an apprenticeship at a bank in Basel and lived with his elderly grandmother.

  One night, Leni fell in the bathroom. Patrick heard a crash, ran downstairs, and found his grandmother lying on the floor, her face racked with pain. He called the ambulance. Leni had broken her hip and was taken to the city hospital and operated on. The operation was a success and she recovered, but she never returned to Herbstgasse again. Everyone, including the family doctor, Dr. Schlumpf, advised Leni to move into an old-age home. She decided on La Charmille, a Jewish old-age home in Riehen, near Basel, and her brother Herbert, ninety-three years old himself, joined her there soon afterward. Financially, there were no difficulties, since Otto had left them both a legacy in his will. “Even after his death he looked after his siblings,” Erich said when he first learned of the provision. He was very grateful, since they may have owned their own house but had never managed to save up any real money for their retirement.

  Patrick, the solicitous grandson, took the streetcar every day after work to La Charmille, about half an hour from Basel, to visit Leni. That was naturally quite an inconvenience for an eighteen-or nineteen-year-old young man, but he was glad to do it, for his grandmother’s sake.

  In Berlin, Gerti was already packing up their books when she got the phone call from a friend in Basel saying that Leni’s business had been run into the ground and that she would probably not be able to make very much money from it. “It was terrible news for me,” Gerti says. “But we had gone too far, there was no turning back.”

  They arrived in Basel on March 10, 1986, and on March 11 the big moving truck came with their things. The next day, March 12, Buddy had to go to Stuttgart, where he was performing in The Canterbury Tales. Gerti was left alone with the moving boxes, with Patrick, who was more and more reluctant to go to the bank, with fourteen-year-old Oliver, who was dealing with a new school, with Leni, who was still bedridden at the time, and with a business that was in fact in desperate shape. The manager, who had agreed to stay until the end of the year and show Gerti the ropes, called two days later and said that she had found another job and would not be coming back.

  “So there I was,” Gerti says, “and I had no idea how I was going to manage. I was constantly running back and forth between the house, the store, and the old-age home, Oliver was there and he needed me, and there was Fritzi in Birsfelden, I had to worry about her too, and on top of it the business, where I felt totally lost. Everything was dirty, there were no details anywhere about the periods or prices of the pieces there. I was desperate. I had taken a correspondence course in antiques, but I had zero practical experience. For example, baroque or Biedermeier pieces all look different depending on whether the object is from Germany, Italy, or France. The beginning was truly terrible, and right away I got an ulcer too.”

  Luckily, there was Zita, a neighbor, who offered her help. The two women shut the store and got to work cleaning everything first. The carpets had all been piled up on top of each other, and the creases were stiff with dirt, so that they had no choice but to cut them to pieces and throw them away. They polished the silver and the furniture, dusted everything, and tried to arrange everything to attract possible buyers.

  A lot of people actually did come to the reopening, but more out of curiosity than anything else. They wanted to see how “the new place” looked. Still, gradually, they began to buy. In the first year, the business ultimately cost more than it brought in—in the end, Zita had to be paid. Gerti threw herself into her work and took care of her sons, the two old women, Herbert, and the business. And on top of that was the housework, of course. Gerti had no Mariuccia, no Frau Baumann, no Imperia—she had to do everything alone, since Buddy was away most of the time. Because he was no longer a permanent member of an ensemble, he had to take guest roles at various theaters in various cities. Sometimes he had parts on TV too, but these roles weren’t so thick on the ground either.

  On top of their financial worries, they were worried about Leni, who was getting worse. She died on October 2, 1986, two years to the day after her husband, Erich. It was Patrick who happened to be at her side, visiting his beloved Mona-Grandma, and he held her hand until it was over, which was merciful for Leni but terribly difficult for Patrick, who almost collapsed. Like Erich, Leni Elias née Frank was buried at the Jewish cemetery in Basel. Now only Herbert and Fritzi were still alive from the older generation, and Gerti took on responsibility for them. Herbert died on March 20, 1987, at age ninety-five, in La Charmille.

  It was not how they had imagined their first year back home. Oliver was having greater difficulties than his parents had expected with the transition from metropolitan Berlin to sleepy Basel, wher
e everyone spoke this strange Swiss German. He rubbed people the wrong way with his High German and must have seemed arrogant to his teachers. He got along brilliantly with his schoolmates, though. They gave him the courage to keep speaking High German, and some of his friendships from then have lasted until today. Patrick, too, was not happy with his apprenticeship at the bank. One day, when he was visiting Buddy’s former skating partner Otti Rehorek and his second wife, and Otti asked how it was going at the bank, he burst out with how horrible everything about banking was to him. He wanted nothing to do with any of it, every day was torture to him.

  “What else do you want to do?” Otti asked, and Patrick answered: “I want to be an actor. I’ve always wanted to be an actor.”

  Everyone descended on Buddy and Gerti and asked them why they wouldn’t let the boy do what he so desperately wanted to do. The discussion that followed made it clear to Buddy and Gerti that they were wrong, and they gave their permission for Patrick to quit and go to Bochum to attend acting school there. Oliver, too, would leave Basel immediately after graduating and return to Berlin, to take acting classes with Maria Körber.

  Things went better starting in their second year in Basel, and Gerti actually managed, with Zita’s help, to revive the business. It was a great relief for Buddy, of course, to have Gerti at his back. Life became more relaxed, they got used to things there, and the house on Herbstgasse became their home, just as they had dreamed it would.

  Gerti ran the business for fifteen years, paid for her sons’ education, and was the primary breadwinner for her family, as Leni had been.

  Buddy took parts at various theaters but did most of his work for television. Gerti worked in the store and took care of the household, and especially of Fritzi. She was helped by Oliver and Patrick, who loved Fritzi very much—Fritzi had taken on the role of a substitute grandma for them after Leni’s death. Fritzi came over for meals almost every Sunday and sometimes joined the family on vacations to Nax. Eventually, though, Fritzi grew so frail and confused that she could no longer live alone. Eva Schloss, her daughter, brought her to London in 1997, where she died in 1998, at age ninety-three. Her urn was buried in Birsfelden.

  After fifteen years, Gerti was sixty-eight years old, and she gave up the store. She arranged a going-out-of-business sale, and describes it as “like Hollywood. People rushed the doors. Two of my sisters were there, and a friend from Berlin, and another from Basel, and the five of us were selling, selling, selling. I was up a ladder the whole time fetching down lamps. It was crazy what was going on. It was really a crowning finale for Leni’s business.”

  Buddy Elias in Molière’s Hypochondriac, Komödie Basel, 1997–98 (photo credit 19.1)

  Today, Gerti is also on the board of the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel, like Buddy, who spent more time working with the Fonds and attended every meeting starting in 1986. He has been president of the Anne Frank-Fonds since 1996, fulfilling Otto Frank’s wish that a member of the family always be on the board. Buddy dedicates his energy and all his free time to what he now calls his “life task.” Just as the diary became the center of Otto’s and Fritzi’s lives, it is now the focus of Buddy’s and Gerti’s. The whirlpool that sucked in Otto works on them as well.

  Someone said once that Anne Frank is dead, Otto lives on for her. Now they could say: Anne Frank is dead, Buddy Elias lives on for her.

  The most important task of the Fonds is to distribute donations to the many organizations that approach the Fonds for help. Everywhere in the world, projects that promote peace and intercultural understanding can count on its support, especially projects working against xenophobia and racism that are relevant to children and young people. The Fonds also plays a special role for “the Righteous”: the non-Jewish men and women who saved Jews during the Holocaust. The Anne Frank-Fonds devotes particular energy to Eastern Europeans, since in the West, where there are obviously also “the Righteous,” they tend to be taken care of by the national safety nets. Not so the ones in Poland, Romania, and the Baltic countries. They are old now, often sick, and often without the medicines they need, either because they are not available there or because they are too expensive. The Fonds pays for their medicines, hearing aids, and other assistance. To prevent any fraud or misuse of the funds, Yad Vashem, the memorial and research center in Jerusalem dedicated to victims of the Holocaust, needs to certify that they actually did save Jews. In 2000, the Anne Frank-Fonds put a new plan into effect: endowing a chair in ethics for a professor at the University of Basel, currently occupied by Professor Stella Reiter-Theil from Germany. In the spring, the Institute for Applied Ethics and Medical Ethics was founded in the medical school. One of its high points to date was an International Conference on Clinical Ethics Consultation, about advising on the difficult questions of patient care; over two hundred participants from a wide variety of fields and countries were in attendance.

  Buddy Elias keeps the memory of Anne Frank alive by answering letters, giving lectures, and working to help people who need assistance. The many trips that he has to take for the foundation, for Anne Frank, are often difficult, but he does his work satisfied with the knowledge that his cousin is still as important as she deserves to be to so many people, especially to young people, and that her ideals have not been forgotten. He sometimes thinks about the fact that he is the only member of Anne’s family left who knew her when she was alive—the real Anne, the mercurial, rebellious, imaginative girl she once was. One day he will take these memories with him to the grave, and when he and the people who knew Anne as a schoolmate and friend are gone, only Anne Frank the icon will be left: a symbol for the one and a half million Jewish children who lost their lives in the Holocaust.

  Epilogue

  Basel, a gray January morning, 1946. A tall man in a loose, shabby winter coat draped across his thin shoulders leaves the house on Herbstgasse. Knit earmuffs stick out from under a hat that is a bit too big for him. In one hand he carries a brown cardboard suitcase, in the other a shopping bag with a knit jacket, a couple of books, a thermos with coffee, and some sandwiches wrapped in newspaper. A small, fragile woman is walking next to him, wearing her fur coat—not exactly new, but well tailored—and a white hat, white gloves, and high-heeled shoes. She looks positively elegant compared to him. At the garden gate the man turns around one last time to face the two men standing at the top of the stairs and waving—a distinguished middle-aged gentleman and a very young man—then he steps out the gate and follows the woman down the street.

  The man is Otto Frank, who has spent three weeks in Basel with his family: his mother, sister, brother-in-law, brother-in-law’s mother, and nephews, Stephan and Buddy. Three weeks that were deeply moving for all of them, because for the first time he came to Herbstgasse alone, without one or two daughters with him, as he always had before the war. The woman next to him is Leni Elias, taking her brother to the train station after he said goodbye to everyone and promised to come back again soon. Leni clings to this “soon” as much as Alice, his mother, does. After the long years of separation, a “soon” is a sign of hope and consolation.

  They walk alongside each other through the cold streets to the streetcar stop. It is not yet totally light out, in fact it would never get truly light in Basel that day, the winter sky hangs too low over the city and the cloud cover is too gray. Otto considers all the old houses in this city that was spared the war—buildings standing there as complacently as if there weren’t ruins and rubble throughout all of Europe. The buildings radiate security and safety, security that Otto can no longer believe in.

  In the streetcar they sit next to each other and look out into the gray, overcast morning. “It’ll snow soon,” Leni says, just to have something to say, and Otto says that it snows less often in Amsterdam than in Switzerland and melts faster. Then they fall silent again. The other passengers are mostly silent too—men and women with scarves or turned-up collars, even, strangely, the children going to school with satchels on their backs and wool caps pulle
d down low over their ears. It feels like the cloud cover is pressing down on everyone’s mood.

  “Erich might be able to go to Amsterdam soon,” Leni says next to him. “The company has put in an application, so there’s a good chance he’ll get a travel permit. Write and tell us if you need anything, he can take it with him.”

  Otto strokes his fingers along the scarf that his mother has knit him in these three weeks; the gloves and the new socks are from Grandma Ida. “You’ve all already given me so much,” he says.

  And Leni says: “I wish there was more we could give you.”

  The streetcar stops at the train station and they get out, pushing their way to the platform between the other travelers.

  The train is not there yet. They stand facing each other, looking at each other. “I am so sorry,” Leni says.

  Otto nods, then suddenly says: “She had gray eyes. They looked dark, but they weren’t brown, they were gray.”

  “Who?” Leni asks.

  “Anne.”

  Leni puts her arms around him, lays her head on his shoulder, and hears his voice right next to her ear: “If I ever forget that, you have to remind me. Promise me that. They were gray.”

  Leni starts to cry. Otto takes the glove off his right hand, takes a handkerchief out of his coat pocket, and wipes away her tears, the way he used to do when she was still a child.

  “Oh, Leni,” he says, “we imagined our lives so differently.”

  “Completely, totally different.”

  Then the train comes. Otto takes out the tickets that Erich had bought for him three days before and kisses his sister as sweetly as he always used to, before picking up his suitcase and bag and getting on the train. After finding a seat, he opens the window and leans out. They look at each other. Again neither says a word, but they also don’t need to. They are again as close as they used to be, when life still lay before them, when they didn’t yet know that it would not bring them only joy, but also so much sorrow. When they didn’t yet know that life’s most important lessons are endurance and bearing up under the blows of fate.