Newly disclosed letters written by the father of Anne Frank illuminate his desperate attempts to get the family out of Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a New York-based organization that focuses on the history and culture of Eastern European Jews, said yesterday it had discovered the file among 100,000 other Holocaust-related documents about a year and a half ago. The institute did not immediately disclose the find because it had to explore copyright and other legal issues, said Cathy Callegari, a spokeswoman for YIVO.

"We have come across the file which belonged to Otto Frank, documenting his efforts to emigrate his family and get them out of Holland," she said.

Ms. Callegari said the documents include letters that Mr. Frank wrote to relatives, friends and officials between April 30, 1941, and Dec. 11, 1941, when Germany declared war on the United States. The material will be released on Feb. 14, she said.

The disclosure came as a surprise to Bernd Elias, Anne's cousin and the president of the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. The organization, established by Mr. Frank, holds the rights to Anne's writings, according to its website.

"We would love to have them in our archive. I mean, we are the heirs of Otto Frank," Mr. Elias said.

The Frank family's hiding place in a secret annex in an Amsterdam canal-side warehouse has been turned into a museum.

The letters document how Mr. Frank tried to arrange for his family -- wife Edith, daughters Margo and Anne and mother-in-law Rosa Hollander -- to go to the United States or Cuba.

His attempts to arrange a route out of the Netherlands were unsuccessful. The family took refuge in July, 1942, hiding for more than two years before being arrested. Anne described the family's life in hiding in a diary that has sold an estimated 75 million copies.

The letters were initially held by the New York City-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which gradually transferred its archives to the YIVO Institute in 1974. She said a volunteer archivist at the YIVO Institute discovered Mr. Frank's letters about a year and a half ago.

Anne died of typhus at age 15 in a concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945. Her father returned to the Netherlands to collect his daughter's notes and published them in the Netherlands in 1947.

Time magazine first reported on the newly discovered documents on its website yesterday.

Credit: Associated Press

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