Anne Frank's Family Read online

  “Yes, it’s true,” Otto said, and he explained: “It was like a whirlpool. Once I started, I was more and more sucked in. I spent almost all my time on it. It took a lot of work to make a readable text out of the two versions.”

  “Yes, you told us that Anne wrote the diary twice,” Buddy said. “And I remember you saying something about a government minister’s speech.”

  “We had a radio,” Otto said, “even though of course it was prohibited—the Jews had been ordered to turn in their radios a long time before that. Anne always said that the radio went into hiding just like us. But since everything was illegal anyway, it didn’t matter that we listened to the illegal radio station, Oranje. The Dutch government had fled to England at the start of the occupation and spent the whole time there as a government in exile. They used Oranje to keep the Dutch people informed about the events on the front, the battles, the resistance. And they said over and over again that we had to hang on, liberation was right around the corner. Especially after the Allies landed in Normandy.” Otto fell silent for a moment, then went on in a quieter voice: “We believed it too, that liberation was right around the corner, but it wasn’t, at least not for us. For us it came too late.” His voice had grown so soft with these last words that Buddy could barely hear them. He didn’t say anything. What could he have said?

  Otto pulled himself together and went on: “In early 1944, one of these ministers in exile, Bolkestein, gave a speech on the radio. I still know what he said, I’ve read a transcript in the meantime but I would have remembered it perfectly anyway. ‘History cannot be written on the basis of official documents alone.’ That’s true, Buddy. It’s only when people tell and write down what they experienced, they themselves personally, that other people, who weren’t there and didn’t have those experiences, might be able to understand or at least have some idea about what happened, what they did to us Jews. How else could anyone even conceive that it was possible? Never in the history of the human race has there been anything like this, this organized, mechanized, assembly-line murder of millions of people. It must never happen again, Buddy, but anything that has happened once can happen again …” Otto was crying, and Buddy held his hands, helpless and full of sympathy. He would often see Otto cry.

  “You know,” Otto went on after he had dried his eyes, “the idea that my loved ones were only three out of millions is no consolation. It doesn’t make it any easier for me. And I have a hard time believing what happened—even me, who saw it all with my own eyes and went through it in person. Auschwitz was another world, another planet. I’ve heard that said many times—many of us talk about ‘Planet Auschwitz.’ And Auschwitz wasn’t the only one, of course. We have to tell this story, every one of us, even if, in truth, it can’t be told, because there are no words for it, words like ‘horrible’ and ‘monstrous’ are not enough to describe it. I sometimes think we need to invent a new language for it.”

  Neither says another word. Otto gives himself over to his thoughts, and Buddy does not know how he can console him. There is no consolation. “Come on, let’s take a walk,” Otto says at last.

  He continues his story while they walk. “This Minister Bolkestein had said that they would have to found an institute after the war to collect, prepare for publication, and publish everything that showed how terribly the Dutch people had suffered under the German occupation. He mentioned as examples pastors’ sermons, letters from forced laborers, and diaries. All of us in the Secret Annex knew that Anne was keeping a diary, and after this speech we rushed over to her and said that maybe her diary would be published one day too. To tell you the truth, we clutched at any new topic of conversation like a lifeline that might save us from drowning in an ocean of boredom—there was nothing new in the Annex, we had squeezed the life out of every possible topic long ago, there were no new stories, everyone knew everything about everyone. Or at least that’s what we thought. We didn’t take it seriously, this idea of publishing her diary. But Anne was different—she took it seriously, she took everything much more seriously than I realized. Now I know that she had been writing in her diary for a long time that she wanted to be a journalist and a writer. In any case, she soon began copying out her own diary onto carbon paper that Miep brought up from the office. So there are two versions of the diary, her original one and a second one that she wrote with an eye to publication.”

  In putting together the second version, Anne did not limit herself to little corrections or leaving out passages that she thought were uninteresting: she combined entries and expanded the diary after the fact by adding more to existing entries or writing entirely new ones. So there were two more or less different versions, and Otto used both to create the edition he published.

  It would not have been possible to do it differently. A year was missing from Anne’s original diary—one or two of the notebooks must have been lost when the residents of the Annex were arrested by the German secret police, the “Green Police,” and their Dutch accomplices. By writing out a second version, she had saved these lost entries after all. And even aside from that year there were many important entries missing that were written only later. So they couldn’t publish only the first version, but publishing only the second version would have been a great loss as well, since there were interesting scenes in the first version that Anne herself had decided not to carry over, and because Anne had not finished recopying and rewriting the diary: the entries in the second version ended in March 1944, while the original diary went up to August 1, 1944, three days before their arrest. So five crucial months would have been missing. For these reasons, Otto saw no other option besides using both versions.

  “How can you be so sure that she really wanted to publish the second version?” Buddy asked. “That she thought about publishing it at all?”

  “Why else would she have copied and rewritten her diary?” Otto said. “Another thing is that she included a list of names and fictional names. She assumed that we would all survive and would not want our real names used, so all the characters were supposed to stay anonymous. Anne wanted to call herself Robin, van Pels was supposed to be van Daan, Pfeffer would be Dussel, Kleiman would be Koophuis, and so on.”

  “And? Did you use those names?” Buddy asked.

  Otto Frank nodded. “Most of them.”

  Only in the new reader’s edition that would be published in 1991 (known as The Definitive Edition in English) did the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel decide to use the real names, at least of the men and women who had helped the Franks, to give them the honor that they deserved.

  When Otto Frank finished putting together the manuscript, he asked Albert Cauvern, an old friend who was working at a radio station at the time, to check the diary for grammatical mistakes and correct any stray Germanisms. Cauvern did so and added a short conclusion: “Anne’s diary ended here. On August 4, 1944, the ‘Grüne Polizei’ made a raid on the ‘Secret Annex’… In March 1945, two months before the liberation of Holland, Anne died in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.”2

  What Otto Frank perhaps did not discuss with his nephew Buddy was that he had made cuts in the diary. For example, he took out places where Anne had talked too explicitly about her bodily changes as she developed into a woman, and he had also—out of an understandable loyalty to his dead wife and the other people in the Annex who had not survived—cut sentences and phrases where Anne expressed herself too cruelly about her fellow residents. Naturally, Anne Frank was sometimes unfair. What thirteen-or fourteen-or fifteen-year-old isn’t in her diary, especially in conditions like that, where it was impossible to avoid her mother or anyone else she was fighting with or even to vent her anger behind their backs? Some of her comments about people who could no longer defend themselves must have been too much for Otto Frank, this man of the utmost civility, equanimity, and understanding. That was surely the reason for many of the cuts that he made. In any case, in putting together a text from the two versions, he very skillfully and sensitively drew out �
�the essential things,” as he always put it, to do justice to his daughter.

  Otto stayed with Buddy in Brussels for three days, a visit that Buddy would never forget and that made his relationship to Otto that much deeper and stronger. They were days of great closeness. “But we didn’t only have serious conversations,” Buddy says today. “We also laughed together. I told him about the Ice Revue, about my partner and his wife. Otto came over for dinner once and also came to watch the show. He sat in the first row, and I could see him laughing, laughing hard. And afterward he told me how proud he was of me.”

  Anne’s list of pseudonyms in the diary (photo credit 10.7)

  Gerti, Buddy’s wife, says: “Otto was interested in Buddy’s career his whole life, he followed everything.”

  “Those were three great days,” Buddy says, “and when he left, we both cried.”

  * * *

  1 The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition (New York: Doubleday, 2003), pp. 67–68.

  2 These details are taken from The Revised Critical Edition.

  11.

  Years on the Road

  Buddy’s years on the road had begun. After Brussels was London. How exciting it must have been for this young man to go out into the wide world and leave the narrow confines of Switzerland behind him. But there were difficulties too: he was still stateless, even now, and his “labour permit” would run out at the end of October. But he was lucky. In early October he flew to Basel to pick up his new passport—at twenty-three years of age, Bernhard “Buddy” Elias, having lived almost his whole life in Switzerland, was finally a Swiss citizen. Erich and Leni had still longer to wait before they reached this goal.

  London was the first truly metropolitan city that Buddy lived in. It fascinated him. He always entered enthusiastically into new experiences, he loved it when people laughed at their revue numbers, he loved the success, the applause. He also saw his uncle Robert and Robert’s wife, Lotti, in London, of course, who welcomed him with open arms. He was amused to realize that Robert and Lotti were more English than the English, in their clothing, their way of speaking, their way of moving. Lotti had an aristocratically quiet drawl of a voice, and Robert, in his bowler hat, topcoat, and umbrella, practically looked like a caricature of an English gentleman. They were both a little eccentric, but kind. Nonetheless, Buddy’s relationship with his English uncle would never be as warm as with Otto or as friendly as with Herbert.

  Buddy got a driver’s license in London too and wrote to Herbst gasse: “After I passed my driving test last Monday, I got my car right away. You can’t imagine a happier man. Your ‘little one’ with his own car!… Robo and Lotti are thrilled too. Yesterday, I drove Robo to an auction and took Lotti for a drive in rush hour through Piccadilly to Regent street. Lotti was sweating blood but I hadn’t passed my driving test for nothing.”

  When their contract was up, “Buddy and Baddy” were hired by a new Danish group, the Scan Ice Revue.

  Buddy felt right at home in the Scan Ice Revue. He was especially impressed by one of the managers, Volmer Sørensen, a conductor who had been a celebrated pianist before the war and had played under many great conductors, such as Weingartner in Basel in 1932. When the Germans invaded Denmark, he joined the resistance and took many Jews to Sweden at night, in his tiny rowboat. Until the Gestapo caught him. He was captured and tortured, and they crushed his hands so that he would never be able to play the piano again.

  This man was one of the few people whom Buddy told about his uncle Otto and about Edith, Margot, and Anne in those days. He didn’t keep it a secret that he was Jewish, but he didn’t emphasize it either—he didn’t feel sure of his Jewish identity, both because he was not at all religious and because he had stayed safe in Switzerland while millions of Jews were being killed elsewhere in Europe. It would take a long time before he worked through what had happened to him and his family, enough to be able to talk about it with any distance.

  The happy birthday letter that he wrote to his mother in September 1949 shows how well Buddy was doing with the Scan Revue. Sender: “Scan Is Revy [Danish spelling for ‘Ice Revue’], 16, Enighedsvej, Charlottenlund, København.”

  Dear “Leniköppche,”

  … Happy birthday!

  Yes, yes, I know, it was a long long time ago. Now you’re already 56 years old, a very big little girl. And “your little lads” are old enough to be daddies too (or maybe they are already!)

  Yes, my dear Clownmama, the times are changing. I don’t think Mr. Old Bank Director Frank in Frankfurt could ever have dreamed that his grandson would one day entertain the public with his green hair. What would he say if he could look down from Heaven and see me now? “Il n’a pas de sale métier!” and then silently sit down at the card table with Kaiser Wilhelm and lose of course, since his thoughts would be so preoccupied with his meshuggah descendant. But even if his family has broken with the ancient traditions of the Franks, he can’t really complain. Yes, his good wishes fall even now upon the members of his family. Full of pride, he takes the Kaiser by the hand and points down at a little shop in a beautiful country: “There, Willie, won’t you look at that! With that little thing my daughter is getting 7 people through difficult times. I know the situation will get better soon, but she’s been doing it for years and all the boys, never mind the girls, should take a lesson from her!” And a tear of joy from one eye and a tear of pride from the other eye roll down his sunken cheeks.

  The Kaiser, too, is not unmoved by what he sees down here on earth. After dear Grandpa turns away, and the Kaiser thinks no one is watching him, he bows a deep bow to this little Leni who is walking out of Spa len vorstadt 15 and getting on her bicycle. And after one last look of recognition and deep respect at the old banker, he returns to his heavenly hermitage to give our dear Lord a written report of this new paragon of love and sacrifice.

  You know what I hope for for your birthday. May it come true immediately. And don’t buy any groceries or pay the rent with the enclosed money, buy something nice for yourself!

  We’ll be here 10 more days and then we’re off to Norrköping and then 6 weeks in Stockholm! Nov. 15 or so we’re back in Copenhagen. It would be lovely if you could visit me. Think about it. I’m making better money here in Denmark too. [In English:] Give my love to everyone and a special big-kiss for you! Buddy.

  After the Scandinavian tour they were off to Cairo. Buddy was afraid he would have problems as a Jew in an Arab country. Even though the manager of the tour had explicitly looked into it and assured Buddy that he had nothing to fear, Buddy wrote to Basel: “It will be better if I say I’m Protestant while I’m staying in Egypt, in case anyone asks. I don’t like denying my religion, but for 5 months it’s not too bad. Better safe than sorry.”

  Egypt—his first Middle Eastern country—was very exciting for Buddy, who was enraptured by everything there that was new to him: the foreignness of Cairo and Alexandria, the landscape, the desert, the Oriental voices, colors, and smells, everything that he was seeing for the first time. He wrote enthusiastic letters home: “Cairo—city of noise—city of smells—city of riches—city of poverty, city of beauty and of horrors. My head is throbbing and my eyes hurt. You’d need 100 eyes to take everything in here.” He wrote long and beautiful letters that must have sometimes reminded Alice of the lively and vivid letters that Robert used to write to his parents. She might have drawn this comparison herself, but the family’s letters to Buddy have not been preserved. It seems clear from his answers, though, that Buddy was kept fully informed about everything—that Alice was in poor health, and that Otto had received Dutch citizenship.

  During this period, the family also decided to buy the house on Herbstgasse. The owner had given them the choice to either move out or buy the house. They all felt a connection to the house—it had become a home for them, a fixed center for the family, the way the house at Mertonstrasse 4 in Frankfurt had once been—and they did not want to lose it under any circumstances. Buddy sent the money
for the down payment, just as he would always send money later for the mortgage, repairs, and other necessary purchases. He made comparatively good money, and he was the only one at the time who was in a financial position to save the family home. “I only hope that I stay healthy so I can keep earning money, otherwise I’m screwed,” he wrote in a letter to his father.

  View of the house at Herbstgasse 11, from the garden. Otto Frank and his second wife, Fritzi, lived for seven years on the top floor, on the right. The room beneath it, whose window is also in the roof, was occupied for decades by Alice Frank. (photo credit 11.1)

  When the Ice Revue got to Alexandria, the artists were put up in a splendid hotel, but it soon turned into a hospital for Buddy when he came down with jaundice. Luckily, he recovered by the time of their planned return to Oslo, in May. He wrote to Basel on April 28 that he had gotten out of bed for the first time and felt perfectly fine, although he was still a bit shaky and “a little yellow in the eyes.”

  In the summer of 1950, Buddy returned for a week to Basel, to Herbstgasse. Only then did he fully realize how badly he had missed them all the whole time he was away—Alice, Erich, Leni, Grandma Ida, Stephan, and Herbert, who had returned from Paris again and now had to live in Saint-Louis, near Basel but on the French side of the border, since Switzerland had refused to give him a residence permit. That meant he had to continually commute back and forth between his little apartment and the house on Herbstgasse.

  Alice had grown thin, almost never left her room anymore, and rarely came downstairs for meals. She had never been a large woman, but now she seemed to Buddy downright shriveled, and he hugged her very carefully, afraid he might break her bones. She had grown old and looked her eighty-four years. Sometimes she was attentive and interested and asked Buddy about her oldest son, Robert, and his wife, Lotti—she wanted to know how they looked, how they lived, and what they talked about.