After The War: The Travails Of Otto Frank

Between 1940 and 1942, I saw Anne Frank nearly every day. We were almost the same age, but she was more mature than I was. She was interested in clothes and in film stars and in boys even. She was always laughing and giggling and always the center of attraction. At that time, my family had just fled Austria and moved to Amsterdam, and I spoke very bad Dutch. But she’d say, “Come and meet my father because he’ll speak German with you.” Which I did. And Otto Frank was extremely kind. He and his family had fled Frankfurt in 1933. They used to have a bank there but lost it after the Depression. And then the Nazis came to power, and the world changed even more.

In 1953, after the war was over, my mother married Otto Frank. They had both lost so much. She and I had survived Auschwitz. His life was a mess. He talked continuously of Anne. They had been very close. He had heard from friends about her last days in Bergen-Belsen–how she didn’t think her parents had survived, how her sister Margot got typhus and died, and that Anne, thinking she was the only one left, just gave up.

When Otto first saw us after the war, he showed us the book. “Look what I’ve got. I’ve got Anne’s diary.” And when he read a few pages, he would start to cry. He would say, “I wish I had known how she felt about that.” He had no intention of publishing it. But a friend of his, a history professor, convinced him it was a wonderful document of the period. After much soul searching, Otto decided to do it. He took out things he thought hurtful to people–and five pages where Anne writes of her parents’ marriage, about how she realized it wasn’t a marriage of love. Anne’s mother loved Otto very much, but it was an arranged marriage, and while he was kind, he did not love her. Still, he was grateful to have Anne’s words and to find they had power to influence the world. The book, and working on it, I think it saved him. Eva Schloss wrote Eva’s Story: A Survivor’s Tale by the Step-Sister of Anne Frank