Anne Frank's Family Read online

  Grandma Ida would have to live with this uncertainty, however—it was only long after her death, even after Erich’s death, that Buddy received official confirmation that his uncle Paul had been murdered at Auschwitz. Grandma Ida never knew for sure. At some point she would stop waiting at the door every morning for the mailman, and would give the two sweaters she had knit for Paul to her other son, Erich, who could use them. In the course of time she would utter Paul’s name less and less often, and she would never knit him any more sweaters.

  * * *

  1 Quoted from Raymond Phillips, ed., Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-four Others (The Belsen Trial) (Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh, 1949).

  2 The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition (New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 303. This passage did not appear in the original edition.

  3 Diary of Anne Frank (New York: Doubleday, 1989).

  (photo credit p03.1)

  10.

  Starting Out

  Buddy, not yet twenty-one years old, is sitting in his little room in Bern. Actually, it’s more like a crawl space up under the roof, but that doesn’t matter, he has an engagement—that’s the only thing that counts now, after the tiny role in The Merchant of Venice at the Basel City Theater. An actor can’t live on that no matter how young he is. It’s not exactly what he expected, or rather dreamed of, but as an aspiring actor you have to take what you can get, and in any case now he is out on his own. Financially, everything’s fine: he makes his own breakfast in his room—bread, coffee on a little hot plate—and eats lunch and dinner in the restaurant downstairs. He pays seven francs for room and board together; that’s amazingly cheap, he was very lucky. And maybe he’ll get more roles soon, if another member of the acting company leaves.

  The room is cozy, even though it is small and rather more sparsely furnished than he’s used to at home. But so what, he’ll be able to work well here—he has brought home parts to memorize, and has his English textbook and a grammar book. He has more time here, more peace and quiet. At home there is always something going on. It’s hard to go back to his room and work when someone is visiting somewhere in the house, or when there’s tea on the table, or when Leni comes back from the store or Alice has a letter to read that came from Otto or that she wrote to him. He is in a very different situation from Stephan, his poor brother. Buddy feels so bad for him: he has another abscess now, his pain is just not getting better. Buddy thinks back to when he and Otto visited Stephan in the hospital, and again he has the uncomfortable feeling that he can’t quite get rid of, that he might not have acted toward Otto the right way. He goes over to the window and looks out. Everything here is a bit cramped, but the old city center in Bern is beautiful, that makes up for a lot. The sun has come out, and he wonders if he should take a walk along the Aare; that would be good for his health and would help calm the restless mood that sometimes comes over him.

  But then he sits down at the table after all, the table that takes up so much space in the room that Buddy has to cram himself into his bed at night. A pile of scripts sits waiting for him on the far corner of the table; there are his English books in the other corner, plus notebooks, pencils, pencil sharpeners, erasers, a pen, and a folder with stationery that Alice gave him, probably so that he would not forget to write to his family. There was no need—he wouldn’t forget in any case. He flips open the folder and picks up the pen.

  “Elias Frank,” he writes as the sender’s name. That is what he decided on as his stage name: it sounds more mature than “Buddy Elias,” more serious somehow, and in any case the name Buddy is already reserved for his ice show with Otti, “Buddy and Baddy.” The address sounds good too: “Cactus Cabaret, Corso Theater.”

  “My dear Ottel,” he writes, and hesitates, puts down the pen, chews his lower lip. But then he picks up the pen again after all:

  We didn’t have enough time while you were here in Basel, I’m afraid, to talk about everything we have in our hearts … Maybe you think that I’m not very interested in your life before and during the catastrophe, or in Anne and Margot, because I didn’t talk much about them. But you’d be very wrong. It was only that I didn’t want to make you talk about it too much, I know how painful it must be for you. It was upsetting every time. I didn’t want to ask anything. Now I suddenly feel the prick of conscience and I’m afraid that you’ll think I don’t care. You must know how eager I am to hear you tell me about everything—your life in the Secret Annex, your arrest, Auschwitz, etc.—but to be honest, I was afraid to tear open old wounds. I hope that I’m wrong and that you don’t think I don’t care about everything.

  I’m here in Bern now and have a charming little room where I can work brilliantly, undisturbed … My one great worry is Stephan. He has to be terribly, terribly patient, and has to suffer a lot of pain. I hope the pectin business in Holland is coming back to life and that you can find good work. It would make me very happy if you would write to me. I’ll stop here for today. All the best and see you soon.

  He reads the letter through again before folding it, putting it in an envelope, writing out Otto’s address, standing up, and pulling on his coat. He is so relieved to have finally written this letter that he is taking it straight to the post office.

  Buddy liked appearing onstage in Bern, even though the theaters were only half the size of the ones in Basel and at first he had a lot of trouble getting used to it. He would have been glad to stay in Bern, but it didn’t work out, his engagement was not extended. Instead, he received an offer from a small theater in Winterthur, with performances in the three summer months of 1946.

  Buddy Elias as a young man (photo credit 10.1)

  In May, when he visited Stephan in the city hospital and told him the news, Stephan laughed and said: “In spring, Buddy from Herbstgasse [Autumn Lane] was hired for the summer theater in Winterthur!” Buddy laughed too, he was so happy to see his brother in a good mood at last. Stephan was usually more serious and depressed every time Buddy visited. Buddy loved his brother, and if he had ever felt jealous of the “handsome boy with his dark locks,” that time was past. Stephan was the firstborn, and born on his grandmother’s birthday on top of that, and Buddy had come to terms with the division of family roles. In this respect as well, he felt that he had something in common with Anne: both were second children, neither was an easy baby. Leni said often enough that Buddy was a “screecher,” and Anne was certainly his equal. In addition, Buddy had suffered from eczema as a child, which probably helped to make him a more difficult child than Stephan had been.

  In any case, the brothers had a good relationship, and Buddy visited Stephan as often as he could during Stephan’s long stay in the hospital. They now decided to send Otto a letter together. It seemed to be very difficult for Otto to be in Amsterdam, so far away from his family. Both brothers had read the letter he had sent to Alice at the end of January. The return trip had gone well, he wrote, and Bep had fetched him from the station. He was flooded with questions, and there had been so much to discuss that he had not even read the mail that had come while he was away. The next few sentences were deeply moving to Buddy, and probably to Alice too: “My first thought this morning was: ‘I wonder how Mom slept?’ And I constantly have Stephan in my mind—I feel for him with all my heart. As for what I should try to do myself, I have no idea.”

  This time, unlike last year, Buddy could clearly picture Otto while reading the letter: the corners of Otto’s mouth curving slightly downward, the wrinkles, the unfathomable sadness in his eyes … He always felt a stab of pain when he read Otto’s letters now. And he could equally well understand Otto’s homesick thoughts first thing in the morning: Buddy had those too. He thought with special intensity about home in the mornings when he woke up, and not only because he had to make his own breakfast now, without an Imperia to make it for him—he was seized with a kind of longing for home in the mornings. But the new demands placed upon him forced all such thoughts aside soon enough.

  Budd
y propped another pillow under Stephan’s back and handed him a pen and a writing pad. He observed with pity how difficult it was for his brother to write in his cast.

  My Dear Ottel, One of the first letters I can write by myself is for you! Do you know how often I think of you and your friends. Papa has told me so much about you all and his impressions of Holland were only positive. How I would have liked to go! Buddy is visiting me today. It’s good that he has something lined up for the next few months. As for me, I find myself once again in a cast from top to bottom. Hopefully, I’ll be able to stand up after it’s taken off. Otherwise there’s nothing new to report. I often think how nice it would be to see all three of you brothers reunited here with us. Maybe my wish will soon come true after all. Enough for today, dear Otto, and heaps of greetings to you and the Gieses, with a special extra kiss for you. Your old Stephan.

  Stephan held out the pad to Buddy, exhausted from the effort. There was not much room left on the page so Buddy wrote only: “Dear Ottel, I’m in Basel for just 6 hours and I don’t want to miss the chance to send you my warmest greetings. I’ve been given an engagement for the Winterthur summer theater and I’m really looking forward to that. 1,000 kisses Yours, Buddy.”

  “I. is always talking about Anne’s diary,” Stephan said. “Otto sent her the opening pages, in Miss Schütz’s translation of course, and she’s in a state. She’s said a hundred times already how every word and every sentence makes her see Anne right there in front of her. But she thinks that only people who have an understanding of what happened should read it, she’s afraid it might not mean anything to anyone else. Have you read it yet?”

  Buddy shook his head. “No, just the bits I. has read to us,” he said. Alice had asked him to read everything that Otto had sent, but he was too shy to, for reasons he couldn’t fully explain himself. Of course he would read what his little cousin had written at some point, someday…

  Then he said goodbye to his brother, put the letter in his pocket, and promised to mail it that day, at the station, before getting on the train to Winterthur.

  Buddy’s new job was absorbing. He was engaged for 250 francs a month, and in the second year he would get 280 francs, maybe even 310; today, after more than sixty years, he no longer remembers. But he does remember that the demands placed upon him were great: almost every week there was another premiere. On Mondays there was the blocking and first rehearsal, then rehearsals on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and the premiere on Saturday. When the weather was nice, Buddy went to the swimming pool for fifteen cents to learn his lines. He had lunch at the Peacock Restaurant, which cost only a couple of francs, and had bread and cheese for dinner. He paid eighty francs a month for his room.

  Still, it was a happy time, he says today—he studied, studied, studied, and learned a lot. Some good actors gave guest performances, for example, Leopold Biberti, who starred in a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, where Buddy played Nicola. “Biberti was a brilliant actor. He was born in Berlin, but he always felt Swiss, and he had to flee Germany because he had spoken out loud and clear against the Nazis. He was quite a character, a man with an amazingly deep voice. Women were crazy about him, he always had to fight them off.”

  The economic situation was still very difficult in 1946, and you had to do what you could to make ends meet. Alice wrote to Otto in November and said that they didn’t have enough wood and coal for the winter. Leni’s store was struggling. Luckily, Stephan was getting better, slowly, but he still had the constant itching under the cast to deal with. In Amsterdam, a city that had suffered so terribly under the German occupation, the situation was even worse than in Basel: Otto Frank’s business just could not get going, and in fact it would not be until the early 1950s that it would make a regular profit. Until then, it was a time of scarcity and need. There were still shortages of food, of clothing, of everything, but especially of fuel. The electricity and gas came on only certain hours of the day. Still, everyone was very relieved that the terrible war was over—things could only get better.

  Letter home from Buddy Elias, June 3, 1946 (photo credit 10.2)

  Buddy would not have thought about it too much: he concentrated on his work, his acting. On June 2, 1946, his twenty-first birthday (and the first one he didn’t celebrate with his family), Buddy received letters and a package from Basel. The very next day, he sat down and wrote a “collective letter” back, since, he said, he couldn’t very well write four letters with the same contents:

  Isn’t that true, I., you’re not mad at me for that? To make it up to you, I’ll write to you first. Sweet I.! I don’t think there is anyone in the world who can write such beautiful, loving, and clever things as you can! I was tremendously happy to read your letter. You can be certain that I will do everything I can not to disappoint you. My career is sacred to me and I am approaching it with all the necessary seriousness. The electric shaver is partly from you too, so thank you very much for that. Now I will pass to Grandma Ida, to stay with the older generation for now, but please read on, I., you will find answers to your other questions farther down in this letter.

  So, dear Grandma Ida! thank you very much as well for your letter. You already gave me the socks and the beautiful towel before, but thank you for them again. I was definitely sorry not to be able to see you all on my birthday, but unfortunately there was no way around it.

  And now to you, dear Leni and Papa! (saving the best for last) Thank you both very much for all the wonderful surprises. All the beautiful ties were chosen brilliantly. The visiting cards are perfect, the handkerchiefs charming, and the socks lovely. Needless to say, your letter was wonderful and nice as always. I haven’t received the stationery yet, I’m sure it will come soon. Thank you very much in advance. Please forward the enclosed letter to little Marie! And thank you both too for the shaver. I have never felt what family really is more than now. I feel how much I belong with you, Leni and Papa, and especially with you, my dear Steph, like never before. For the first time, I can see what our family really is! For my whole life, together with you and having the inconceivably great good fortune never to be apart, I took your presence for granted. Now that for the first time I am away from home for an extended period, no longer fed and sheltered by my beloved parents, I feel for the first time what it really means to be homesick! But I don’t want to get too sentimental—and there’s no real reason to, since everything is excellent here and countless people would be happy to have it half as good as me. And now [in English], “last but not least,” to you, my dear Steph! How happy I was to get the first of your letters in your own handwriting again! Thanks very much to you too for your contribution to the shaver. I am tremendously happy to hear that you will be out of your cocoon soon, and I would so love to be there when you get up for the first time! My dear Steph! There was a time when I was extremely worried about your illness and very pessimistic (who wasn’t?). But I have to tell you that I’m exactly the opposite now. I’m sure that if (to assume the worst!!) you still have any aftereffects (which I don’t think you will!), that it won’t make a difference in your future life. I know that you will be just as successful at whatever you do as you would have been if you didn’t have these health problems. I am certain, dear Steph, that with all your intelligence, your superb noble character, and your education, you will find your way! Needless to say, you can always count on my moral + whenever possible material support. And now I will tell you a little about myself. The last few weeks were very stressful. I left for Winterthur early every morning and came back home to Läppli [a dialect play] in Zurich only at night … Rehearsals for Arms and the Man will probably start at the end of the week. Bibi is playing the lead role, I don’t know what part I will have yet. I have Pentecost off … and will be in Basel Monday morning, until Tuesday 7:13 a.m. Hopefully nothing will come up in the meantime! I really look forward to seeing you. I hope Bit will be there until then. Hugs and kisses to everyone, Yours, Buddy.

  “Bit” wa
s the family nickname for Herbert—the “problem child” who had fallen upon further difficulties in Paris. He had lost his job again, and once again Alice was receiving letters from friends and acquaintances who were worried about his situation. It was the usual story: he had never held down a job for long. Alice was upset and Leni muttered curses that it was high time her brother finally grew up. Erich wrote to Otto that Herbert was lacking direction above all, lacking a goal in life and work to do, and the worst thing was that it constantly kept Alice on tenterhooks when the poor woman needed all her strength for herself. Even so, Erich and Leni did everything they could to bring Herbert to Switzerland, and in the end they succeeded, although not for another few years.

  Buddy had also received a loving and friendly letter for his birthday from Otto, of course, and before he went to bed, he also dug up the birthday letter that Anne had written to him in 1942, a few weeks before she and her family went into hiding in the house on Prinsengracht. He had kept it at the time—in the ordinary way one does, without really thinking about it, maybe it was even by accident—but ever since he found it again while going through his things in preparing to move out of the Herbstgasse house, he had preserved it as a relic, and brought it with him. Four years earlier it was an ordinary birthday letter; now it was something he treasured. For many years he would continue to read it on his birthday, just for himself, without anyone else, even though he soon knew it practically by heart. He always tried to read the Dutch text, not to understand the words, but so as not to forget Anne’s handwriting. He would always keep this letter as proof of her affection for him.