The father of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl whose diaries of life hiding from the Nazis became world famous, sought money and help obtaining a U.S. visa from a wealthy New York friend in hopes of escaping Europe, according to documents released yesterday.

Otto Frank asked for $5,000 from college friend Nathan Strauss Jr., whose father owned Macy's department store, as he tried to escape the Netherlands with his wife, mother-in-law and daughters Margot and Anne, according to documents from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.

"It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for," he wrote in a letter to Mr. Strauss, who was the head of the U.S. Housing Authority at the time.

"You are the only person I know that I can ask."

Anne Frank died at 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

Credit: Reuter News Agency

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