Daniel Mendelsohn: Anne Frank's Father's letters tell a familiar story
[Daniel Mendelsohn, a professor of humanities at Bard College, is the author of “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.”]
AS soon as I read last week about the discovery of the desperate, faded letters written by Anne Frank’s father, I knew my mother would call. “Did you see the paper?” she asked. Yes, I said, I had. “Did you read the letters?” Yes, I said, I did. “I couldn’t,” she murmured. “It’s too sad. They’re too much like my uncle’s.”
Yes, I said, I knew.
The revelation of the existence of a dramatic 1941 correspondence between Otto Frank and American friends and bureaucrats abroad, letters in which his efforts to get his family to safety unravel painfully before the reader’s eyes, now make it clear that we had, after all, really known only the last two acts of the Holocaust’s most famous story. About the long, fraught concealment in the famous secret annex, the whole world knows from Anne Frank’s diary; about their betrayal, deportation and the deaths of three of the four Franks and the four others hiding with them, we know from Otto Frank himself, the sole survivor.
But the new material, which lay for years in an archive of New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research until a researcher’s curiosity about a clerical error brought it to light, now gives us the searing prelude to those well-known chapters, one that involves America as well as Europe — and one that, as my own family knows well, may be the story of many American families without their even being aware of it.
For Otto Frank’s frantic letters from Europe to America appealing for advice, money, bureaucratic assistance — which are available now for inspection by scholars, but will inevitably be made public and, because of the enormous draw of the Frank name, scrutinized, pored over and learned by a vast worldwide audience, in time — will in fact be merely the most famous examples of a genre of writing that was tragically common during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Many if not most Jewish Americans at the time had emigrated from Europe a generation earlier, and as World War II loomed, a large number found themselves the often helpless objects of poignant entreaties by old friends and relatives trapped in Europe as the cataclysm approached....
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AS soon as I read last week about the discovery of the desperate, faded letters written by Anne Frank’s father, I knew my mother would call. “Did you see the paper?” she asked. Yes, I said, I had. “Did you read the letters?” Yes, I said, I did. “I couldn’t,” she murmured. “It’s too sad. They’re too much like my uncle’s.”
Yes, I said, I knew.
The revelation of the existence of a dramatic 1941 correspondence between Otto Frank and American friends and bureaucrats abroad, letters in which his efforts to get his family to safety unravel painfully before the reader’s eyes, now make it clear that we had, after all, really known only the last two acts of the Holocaust’s most famous story. About the long, fraught concealment in the famous secret annex, the whole world knows from Anne Frank’s diary; about their betrayal, deportation and the deaths of three of the four Franks and the four others hiding with them, we know from Otto Frank himself, the sole survivor.
But the new material, which lay for years in an archive of New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research until a researcher’s curiosity about a clerical error brought it to light, now gives us the searing prelude to those well-known chapters, one that involves America as well as Europe — and one that, as my own family knows well, may be the story of many American families without their even being aware of it.
For Otto Frank’s frantic letters from Europe to America appealing for advice, money, bureaucratic assistance — which are available now for inspection by scholars, but will inevitably be made public and, because of the enormous draw of the Frank name, scrutinized, pored over and learned by a vast worldwide audience, in time — will in fact be merely the most famous examples of a genre of writing that was tragically common during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Many if not most Jewish Americans at the time had emigrated from Europe a generation earlier, and as World War II loomed, a large number found themselves the often helpless objects of poignant entreaties by old friends and relatives trapped in Europe as the cataclysm approached....