On April 30, 1941, just days after a Gestapo courier may have threatened to denounce Anne Frank’s father, Otto, to the Nazis, he wrote to his close college friend Nathan Straus Jr. begging for help in getting his family out of Amsterdam and into America.
“I would not ask if conditions here would not force me to do all I can in time to be able to avoid worse,” he wrote in a letter that forms part of a 78-page stack of newly uncovered documents released yesterday. “Perhaps you remember that we have two girls. It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for. Our own fate is of less importance.”
Frank needed a $5,000 deposit to obtain a visa and Straus, the director of the federal Housing Authority, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and the son of Macy’s co-owner, had money and connections. “You are the only person I know that I can ask,” he wrote. “Would it be possible for you to give a deposit in my favor?”
That letter begins a series of personal correspondence and official papers that reveal for the first time the Frank family’s increasingly desperate efforts in 1941 to get to the United States or Cuba before the Nazis got to them. The papers, owned by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, had lain undisturbed in a New Jersey warehouse for nearly 30 years before a clerical error led to their unexpected discovery. Given the thorough historical research and extraordinary efforts to preserve Anne Frank’s legacy, the appearance of this overlooked file is surprising.
The story seems to unfold in slow motion as the painstaking exchange of letters journey across continents and from state to state, their information often outdated by the time they arrive. Each page adds a layer of sorrow as the tortuous process for gaining entry to the United States — involving sponsors, large sums of money, affidavits and proof of how their entry would benefit America — is laid out. The moment the Franks and their American supporters overcame one administrative or logistical obstacle, another arose.
Even the assistant secretary of state at the time, Adolf A. Berle Jr., despaired of the bewildering maze of regulations. As Richard Breitman, a historian at American University, pointed out in a separate background paper, Berle wrote in January 1941 that some consulates ask for a trust fund. “Others ask for affidavits. One particularly shocking case stated that nothing would be accepted save from a relative in the United States under a legal obligation to support the applicant,” he said. “It does seem to me that this Department could pull itself together sufficiently to get out a general instruction which would be complete enough and simple enough so that the procedure could be standardized.”
Ultimately, powerful connections and money were not enough to enable the Franks, not to mention most other European Jews, to break through the State Department’s tightening restrictions. By the summer of 1942, the Franks were forced into hiding. They remained in the secret annex for two years before being turned in, probably by the same courier who initially may have tried to blackmail them. As schoolchildren around the world know, the story ends with the death in concentration camps of 15-year-old Anne, her sister Margot and her mother, Edith, and the publication of Anne’s diary, now a literary and historical landmark that personalizes the Holocaust’s immeasurable loss.
Mr. Breitman explained that after France fell to the Germans in June 1940, fears grew in the United States of a potential fifth column of spies and saboteurs peopled by European refugees. By June of 1941, no one with close relatives still in Germany was allowed into the United States because of suspicions that the Nazis could use them to blackmail refugees into clandestine cooperation. This development closed off the possibility of getting the Frank girls out through a children’s rescue agency or having Otto Frank depart first in the hopes that the rest of his family would quickly follow.
By July, Germany shut down American consulates throughout its territories, retaliating for a similar action on the Americans’ part. As the exchange of letters show, Otto Frank would have had to get an exit permit out of the Netherlands, and transit visas for a series of Nazi-occupied countries to one of the four neutral areas where America still had consular offices. By the summer, an escape to the United States appeared hopeless. “I am afraid, however, the news is not good news,” Straus wrote to Otto Frank on July 1, 1941.
In order to reach a neutral country, Frank then tried to obtain a Cuban visa, a risky, expensive and often corrupt process. In a Sept. 8 letter to Straus, he wrote, “I know that it will be impossible for us all to leave even if most of the money is refundable, but Edith urges me to leave alone or with the children.” On Oct. 12, 1941, he wrote, “It is all much more difficult as one can imagine and is getting more complicated every day.” Because of the uncertainty, he decided first to try for a single visa for himself. It is granted and forwarded to Otto Frank on Dec. 1. No one knows if it ever arrived; 10 days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and Havana cancelled the visa.
The file, originally in the hands of the National Refugee Service, was turned over to YIVO in 1974 along with tens of thousands of other files from private Jewish refugee agencies.
It wasn’t until 2005 that YIVO received a grant to organize and index the 350 file cabinets worth of material it had warehoused in an off-site storage center. In the summer of that year, Estelle Guzik, a part-time volunteer, was sorting through files when she saw that a file jacket was missing the subject’s date of birth, said Carl J. Rheins, YIVO’s executive director. He said that she opened it and saw that the children’s names were Anne and Margot Frank, and said, “Oh my God, this is the Anne Frank file.”
YIVO kept the actual documents under wraps until yesterday because it was figuring out the complicated legal questions of confidentiality and copyright, Mr. Rheins said. The papers are now available to scholars at YIVO on West 16th Street in Manhattan.
The last items in the file date from June 1945 to mid-1946. They include a letter from Otto Frank’s brother-in-law Julius Hollander, who was trying to locate the Franks and arrange for them to emigrate to the United States. There is also a four-line notification that “Mrs. Edith Frank died; daughters are still missing.”
What follows is a letter on Feb. 2, 1946, from Hollander saying that “Otto Frank said he wants to stay in Amsterdam” and no longer wants to come to the United States.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
