Feb. 14

THE NETHERLANDS:

Frank father sent aid pleas to U.S.


Anne Frank's father sent desperate letters to friends and family in the
United States pleading for financial assistance to help the family escape
from the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, according to papers released
Wednesday.

"I would not ask if conditions here would not force me to do all I can in
time to be able to avoid worse," Otto Frank wrote to his college friend
Nathan Straus in April 1941. "It is for the sake of the children mainly
that we have to care for. Our own fate is of less importance."

The letters, along with documents and records from various agencies that
helped people immigrate from Europe, were released by the YIVO Institute
for Jewish Research.

The information documents how Frank tried to arrange for his family --
wife Edith, daughters Margo and Anne and mother-in-law Rosa Hollander --
to go to the United States or Cuba.

Frank wrote to relatives, friends and officials between April 30, 1941,
and December 11, 1941, when Germany declared war on the United States. He
tried to arrange U.S. visas for his family before they went into hiding,
but his efforts were hampered by restrictive immigration policies
designed to protect national security, Holocaust experts said.

He referred to those problems in his letters.

"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," he said in another letter to Straus.

Frank first applied for immigration visas to the U.S. for himself and his
family in 1938, reviving his efforts in 1941 -- a move that may seem lax
with what is now known about the Holocaust, but was logical to Frank at
the time.

"He preferred what seemed to him like the nuisances that encumbered an
otherwise comfortable life under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands to
the insecurity of a life as a double refugee in a new country, even if a
new country could have been found," said David Engel, a professor of
Holocaust studies at New York University.

Frank was unable to secure passage to the U.S. There were nearly 300,000
names on a waiting list for an immigration visa. Also, since Frank had
living relatives in Germany, he would have been unable to emigrate under
strict immigration policies.

Frank's attempt to move his family mirrors thousands of German Jews, said
Richard Breitman, an American University professor who focuses on German
and American intelligence history.

"Frank's case was unusual only in that he tried hard very late -- and
enjoyed particularly good or fortunate American connections. Still, he
failed," Breitman said.

YIVO, a New York-based institution that focuses on the history and
culture of Eastern European Jews, discovered the file among 100,000 other
Holocaust-related documents about a year and a half ago. The institute
did not immediately disclose the find because it had to explore copyright
and other legal issues, said Cathy Callegari, a spokeswoman for YIVO.

Frank's attempts to arrange a route out of the Netherlands were
unsuccessful. The family took refuge in July 1942, hiding for more than
two years before being arrested.

Anne Frank described the family's life in hiding in a diary that has sold
an estimated 75 million copies. The Frank family's hiding place in a
secret annex in an Amsterdam canal-side warehouse has been turned into a
museum.

The letters were initially held by the New York City-based Hebrew
Immigrant Aid Society, which gradually transferred its archives to the
YIVO Institute in 1974.

Callegari said that the HIAS archives consisted of documents from various
agencies so that the true origin of the Otto Frank letters may never be
known. She said a volunteer archivist at the YIVO Institute discovered
Otto Frank's letters about a year and a half ago.

The Anne Frank foundation hopes to obtain the papers, but there have been
no discussions about that, said spokeswoman Teresien da Silva. "We'd like
to have every original paper related to the Frank family. But we don't
know what the outcome will be," she said.

Anne Frank died of typhus at age 15 in a concentration camp at
Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945. Her father returned to the Netherlands
to collect his daughter's notes and published them in the Netherlands in
1947.

Time magazine first reported on the newly discovered documents on its Web
site last week.

(source: Associated Press)