Otto Frank: Anne Frank’s father
Both Yahoo news and The Enquirer report that letters written by Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, have been discovered. He wrote them in 1941, in a desperate attempt to get his family out of Nazi-occupied the Netherlands.
Written when the U.S. consulate in the Netherlands had closed, the letters show how Otto Frank investigated potential escape routes through Spain to Portugal, attempted to secure visas to Paris and tried to arrange for his family to go to the U.S. or Cuba, according to the magazine.
According to Yahoo there are “about 80 documents in total”.
More:
The letters also include correspondence from Otto Frank’s U.S. relatives and a friend, Nathan Straus Jr., the son of the founder of Macy’s department store, according to Time.
The letters were initially held by the New York City-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which gradually transferred its archives to the YIVO Institute between 1948 and 1974. A volunteer archivist at the YIVO Institute discovered Otto Frank’s letters more than two years ago, but the institute has kept the find quiet while exploring copyright and other legal issues, Time said.
The disclosure came as a surprise to Bernd “Buddy” Elias, Anne Frank’s cousin and the president of the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. The organization, established by Otto Frank, holds the rights to Anne Frank’s writings, according to its Web site.
Elias said the YIVO Institute had never asked the foundation about rights to the letters.
“We would love to have them in our archive. I mean, we are the heirs of Otto Frank,” Elias told The Associated Press.
The article at Time can be read here:
The Otto Frank file measures at least half an inch thick, and page by page tells how the Franks tried desperately to escape from Nazi-occupied Holland. By the time Otto wrote his letters, the U.S. consulate in the Netherlands had closed, so he explored possible escape routes through Spain that would ultimately lead to exit via neutral Portugal. He also sought visas to Paris and made attempts to arrange passage for his family to the United States or Cuba.
The documents originally belonged to the New York City-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the country’s oldest refugee resettlement agency. The organization transferred its archives (along with those inherited from agencies it merged or cooperated with) to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in stages from 1948 through 1974.
For the past year and a half, YIVO kept the letters’ existence quiet while exploring the legal issues they raised—such as how they might affect matters of copyright, a major hurdle to their release since the Anne Frank legacy is guarded by various stakeholders, including the Anne Frank Foundation. Late Wednesday YIVO announced that it will declassify and release the documents at a Feb. 14 press conference.
Perhaps the most interesting question raised by the letters’ release is why Otto Frank’s letters and pleas were not answered. YIVO executive director Carl Rheins believes the Frank file raises profound questions about U.S. immigration policy. Meanwhile, YIVO has enlisted “giants” of Holocaust studies to put the letters in context: American University professor Richard Breitman and David Engel, New York University’s Maurice Greenberg Professor of Holocaust studies.
Indeed, many questions need to be answered, if not to understand U.S. immigration policy during WW2 better, then to be able to tell Anne Frank’s story better and / or more accurately.
h/t to both Stuart and Holly.
