Sunday, Feb. 18



A Family History Like Too Many Others


AS soon as I read last week about the discovery of the desperate, faded
letters written by Anne Franks 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 couldnt, she murmured. Its too sad. Theyre
too much like my uncles.

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
readers eyes, now make it clear that we had, after all, really known only
the last two acts of the Holocausts most famous story. About the long,
fraught concealment in the famous secret annex, the whole world knows from
Anne Franks 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 Yorks YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research until a researchers 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 Franks 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.

Certainly this was the case with my grandfather, among whose effects,
after he died in 1980, we were shocked to find a cache of desperate
letters from an older brother in Poland, written throughout 1939, begging
for money, affidavits for visas, anything to save him and his family or
indeed, save any or all of his four teenage daughters, girls around Anne
Franks age. That my grandfather never mentioned this correspondence to us
was an indication of the shattering guilt he must have felt at not having
been able to help his family. It was a feeling shared by many Jews in
America after the war, who are likely to have kept such feelings similarly
hidden from their children and grandchildren.

As with any genre, such letters had their characteristic tropes. Theres
the uneasy opening, hovering between an emphasis on the writers desperate
situation and an awkward acknowledgment that his relationship to the
addressee is perhaps not of recent vintage. To an old college friend Otto
Frank wrote, I would not ask if conditions here would not force me to do
all I can in time to be able to avoid worse ...Perhaps you remember that
we have two girls. A similarly agonizing tension colors the letters of my
great-uncle, Samuel Jger. Youll be wondering ... why Im writing to you
after so many years, one of them begins, although he soon gives the reason
in this and many other letters: From reading the papers you know a little
about what the Jews are going through here, but what you know is just one
one-hundredth of it.

There is, too, the painful appeal for money. Otto Frank, we learn from the
new documents, needed a $5,000 deposit to obtain a visa. You are the only
person I know that I can ask, he wrote his college friend. Would it be
possible for you to give a deposit in my favor? Virtually the same stiff
entreaty echoes eerily through my great-uncles letter to a rich cousin:
Many families have already emigrated to America provided that their
families there put down a $5,000 deposit ... perhaps you could manage to
advance me the deposit. My relative added, with a poignant navet, that his
next letter would be addressed to Franklin Roosevelt himself a futility
that the more sophisticated, better-connected Otto Frank knew enough to
spare himself.

Above all, such letters demonstrate movingly the overriding preoccupation
that nothing was as important as saving the children. It is for the sake
of the children mainly that we have to care for, Otto Frank wrote. If only
the world were open and Id been able to send a child to America or
Palestine, it would be easier, my great-uncle mourned as he started losing
hope. Even after seven decades, such expressions of personal tenderness by
people in the process of being overwhelmed by the tsunamis of history
cannot fail to move us.

Expressions of the personal in the face of seemingly impersonal forces
reminders that each of the millions who were lost was, indeed, a
recognizable person are what made Anne Frank and her family famous in the
first place. Now, as the voices of those who would deny or diminish the
Holocaust grow louder with each passing year, drowning out the fading
chorus of the witnesses and survivors, the equally human voice of her
father, audible once more, will similarly draw the worlds attention to
parts of the drama that took place an ocean away from the secret annex: in
particular, to the appalling failure by the United States to do more for
would-be immigrants. (Among other things, Franks letters are a concrete
reminder of the crushing diplomatic obstacles facing would-be immigrants,
a fatal Catch-22 that even American diplomats at the time were shamed by.)

That failure, as we know, is one from which we as a nation can never stop
learning. But the fact that this latest and unexpected addition to the
Frank file was casually found in a relatively neglected American archive
reminds us, too, that there are many thousands of similar stories on this
side of the Atlantic still waiting to surface, if only we bothered or
knew to look for them: stories that could be part of your own family
history, too.

(source: Op-Ed, New York Times----Daniel Mendelsohn, a professor of
humanities at Bard College, is the author of "The Lost: A Search for Six
of Six Million")