Otto Frank File

Plot

Ever since the first publication of her diary in 1947, Anne Frank has been a very human symbol of the inhumanity of the Holocaust. The story of her family’s two years in hiding in an Amsterdam attic is known the world over. But what hasn’t been known is how desperately her father, Otto, tried to get his family out of the Nazi-occupied Netherlands – an effort that is detailed in a file of nearly 80 pages of original documents recently discovered in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

The bulk of the file, which consists of personal correspondence and official records, spans dates from April 30, 1941, almost a year after Germany invaded the Netherlands, to December 11, 1941, the day Germany declared war on the United States. A month later, the first Jews from Amsterdam were sent to Nazi work camps, and six months after that, the Franks went into hiding. The final documents pick up in June 1945, when Julius Hollander, the brother of Otto’s wife, Edith, sought information about the family’s whereabouts, and end in early 1946, when he was able to contact Otto, the sole survivor, who had made his way back to Amsterdam after being liberated from Auschwitz in January 1945.