Anne Frank's Family Read online

  1. the net curtains: As Anne wrote we had net curtains in all our rooms. We had sent old curtains to the hiding-place before we came, but as the sizes did not fit, we had to arrange them and sew some of them together. Of course these curtains always stayed.

  2. Before getting dark we put before all the windows our black-out. This consisted of an ordinary wooden frame on which strong cardboard was fixed. This frames were made to fit in every window and if you look at the photo showing the window of Anne’s room, you will notice small wooden turnable handles on every side which had to hold the black-out. On the bottom of the windows small wooden pieces were fixed so that the black-out could not slip down. Of course these frames were taken down in the morning. To be quite sure that no light could get through on top or on the sides, we fixed stripes of black paper there as you can see also on the photo. Besides we had clothcurtains, not because it was necessary for the blackout, as this was safe with what we had, but to make the rooms look nicer.

  3. In our rooms no window was painted. However there were some windows bluepainted. If you look at the map of the house shown in the book, the windows of the storeroom second floor behind, facing the secret annexe, were painted. Besides the windows of the landing were treated in a manner to prevent people from looking through. A sort of transparent paper with a pattern was glued on the glass, so that light could come in, but you could not see through.

  In the front office first floor there were very heavy, lined dark red wool-en curtains which were sufficent. In the front rooms, they stopped work before dark and in the rear office ordinary black paper rollcurtains were used.

  I hope these descriptions will be useful to you.

  You certainly will have heard that my wife and I are due to arrive in New-York November 5th and we hope to have the opportunity to meet you.

  We are thinking of you many a time remembering the hours we spent together.

  All the best to you from both of us and kindly give our regards to George.

  Yours sincerely

  Otto Frank

  This letter, describing the measures that the occupants of the Secret Annex were forced to take in order to prevent anyone outside from noticing that there were Jews in hiding there, is impressively precise. These precautions are also an indication of the occupants’ fear, which must have been ever present, even though the daily handling of the blackout curtains must have quickly become routine.

  On February 20, 1958, Otto Frank recorded his impressions of Millie Perkins, the actress who had accepted the part of Anne Frank in the movie. Again he wrote in English:

  When I first met Millie we both felt the importance of the meeting, and she was rather shy and wouldn’t speak very much. She impressed me as a very modest sensitive girl who felt the importance of representing Anne in a picture.

  Her eyes first impressed me—dark eyes—very tender, with faith and sincerity. You think they are dark eyes, but they are blue. Anne’s eyes were very similar and were very noticeable. She did not have brown eyes—they were grey.

  Later, Millie and I had a serious talk about Anne, the conditions in hiding etc. She asked very clever and intelligent questions.

  My general impression of Millie: she looks very young—a charming, natural girl, and she does not act like an “actress.” I think she is very suitable for the role.

  The second time we met she was much more free in her behavior, which I felt was more or less a sign of confidence. I think we both had the feeling of confidence in each other, and I remarked that we were both born on the 12th of May. So we compared characteristics—we are both very handy in finishing things, like electrical and mechanical things. We have a certain kind of nervousness and sensitiveness.

  Millie has a movement of her hands, like Anne had—and she has a little trick of bending her fingers backward, just as Anne did. She takes care of herself (her personal grooming), just as Anne did. Anne would not go without having her hair combed, nails done—she was very soignee—very neat, as Millie seems to be.

  When we first met, Millie said—“when I read the script and the book I knew it was all real. After speaking with you, I really felt the reality of it all.”

  I am confident that Millie will represent Anne in a very natural way because she now identifies herself with Anne. She is trying to entirely live the role. She has asked me many questions about everything so that she will understand how Anne felt about everything—all of her inner feelings, and her personality.

  I think that the casting of Diane Baker for the part of Margot is just wonderful. She is so very much like Margot was—the other day as I looked at her profile, I was struck with the great resemblance. She has the same sweet, quiet dignity. I think the casting of Millie and Diane as sisters will be perfect as there is the same difference between them as there was between Anne and Margot.

  It must have been difficult for Otto Frank to compare the two actresses, Millie Perkins and Diane Baker, to his daughters, Anne and Margot. All the more remarkable is the openhearted friendliness with which he treated them, especially Millie Perkins. Once again he showed the trait that must have been so characteristic of him: withdrawing his own personality from the situation and always being ready to engage with other people.

  So Otto was very fond of Millie Perkins, and of Diane Baker too. He met everyone involved in the filming, of course. He traveled with Fritzi to America to advise George Stevens and the actors about the details. Buddy was kept informed about everything too, as his letters show. He wrote in February 1958: “I’m not surprised that Otto and Fritzi like it at the Hacketts’. It’s beautiful there.” In April: “I can only partly understand why Ottel would not like Schildkraut. He is a typical actor, the way little Moritz would imagine an actor. Completely taken with himself, puffed up, ambitious, and as they say in English ‘a big ham.’ But he was always extremely nice friendly and sincere with me.”

  Joseph Schildkraut played the father, as he had in the play, and Gusti Huber again took the role of Edith Frank. The young actors who would play Anne, Margot, and Peter were not entirely appropriate, because of their ages: Millie Perkins had just turned twenty when the movie was shot, so she was five to seven years older than Anne when she had written the diary; Diane Baker was also twenty, three to five years older than Margot; and Richard Beymer, twenty as well, was a little older than Peter, who died in the Mauthausen concentration camp when he was eighteen.

  The settings also didn’t correspond to the diary. Stevens shot the exterior scenes in Amsterdam, but a set of the Secret Annex was built at the Fox studio and constructed as a single room so that it would seem more like an attic. The movie clearly differed from the diary in another regard as well: in the movie, only Miep Gies and Mr. Kraler (Kugler) protected and cared for the occupants of the Annex—Bep Voskuijl and Johannes Kleiman were written out.

  The movie premiered in 1959. Although it won three Oscars the following year—Shelley Winters for Best Supporting Actress as Petronela van Daan (van Pels), Lyle R. Wheeler for Best Art Direction, and William C. Mellor for Best Cinematography—the reviews were less positive, and the movie was not a great commercial success. Possibly this was because people did not want to hear anything more about the Holocaust—the argument that is always made. In any case, the attendance figures left something to be desired. Another reason might have been that the movie was ultimately too superficial: as a British journalist wrote in the Daily Mail, “The Diary of Anne Frank is an outstanding instance of a subject being diminished by filming … The girl who wrote the diary must have had something more than the perky charm of a New World Junior Miss … These were European Jews in a European situation. But as presented here, especially by Shelley Winters and Ed Wynn they become stock figures from any tragic-comedy of Jewish life in Brooklyn.”

  The Lexikon des Internationalen Films (Dictionary of International Film) says: “The restrained, matter-of-fact style of Anne Frank’s famous diary entries is given a largely conventional dramatization. The convincing perform
ances and seriousness of the presentation, however, do force the viewer to confront the true story that is the basis for the film and among the most moving testimonies we have from the National Socialist period.”

  Buddy saw the movie for the first time in September 1959, in Tours in the Loire valley in France, during his European tour. He wrote to the family on Herbstgasse:

  The Anne movie is on the whole excellent. Stevens’s direction brilliant. It still strikes me a bit too much like a stage play on-screen, but that is probably just my personal critical opinion … Little Perkins is sometimes charming, especially in the love scenes, when you can feel Stevens’s firm hand. Other times, she doesn’t reach the audience. Also I have to say that for me she is a bit too much like a typical modern American teenager, which you notice especially in her speech since almost all the other actors talk in some kind of slightly foreign accent, which is good. Shelley Winters is especially excellent with her very faint Yiddish accent. Gusti Huber is better in the movie than onstage, Schildkraut is the opposite. The actor who played Dussel onstage was better than Bert Lahr [actually Ed Wynn] in the movie. Jakob brilliant, Margot brilliant too and the most like our real Margot. Peter was okay but could have been better. Kraler and Miep were good. I still would have rather seen Dina Doronne. The background music was exquisite, very beautiful, and there is nothing to criticize about the camera work either.

  In this letter too, Buddy is above all an actor passing judgment on his colleagues. His reaction has a greater distance than he was able to maintain when reading the diary itself, and his judgments were amazingly accurate, when you compare them with those of the British journalist who had described Millie Perkins as having “the perky charm of a New World Junior Miss,” and the academy that awarded Shelley Winters the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. In all his years on the ice, Buddy never lost his sense for the theater and acting.

  16.

  Homesick for Herbstgasse

  In the spring of 1958, Holiday on Ice traveled to South America, a tour that according to Buddy’s descriptions must have been exciting and beautiful. In Lima, he attended a rehearsal for a stage production of The Diary. He described the director as gifted and serious, and Anne as the weak point of the production: the actress was too old, looked too old, moved as though she were too old, and screamed loud enough to make the auditorium shake, he said. Here too, in Lima, he met with a distant relative: Frau Holzer-Holländer, a cousin of Edith’s. With his friend and colleague Denny he took a side trip to the Incan village of Pachacamac with Frau Holzer’s brother, Richard Holländer, and Richard’s wife. It was not far from Lima, so they could eat lunch at the Holländers’ house, and Buddy had never seen such a house: it moved him to write, “A palace! Oh, it must be wonderful to be rich.” Aside from the chauffeur, the Holländers had servants, a cook, a maid, and a rose garden illuminated at night with different-colored lights. The kitchen was as big as the whole ground floor of the Herbstgasse house, he said, and furnished in the most modern way possible, of course.

  Despite the beauty, excitement, and success of the tour, Anne’s diary came up again and again in his letters. For example, on May 2, 1958, from Lima: “Since one of our shows was canceled, I had the opportunity to see the premiere of The Diary here … I am happy to report that the performance was quite extraordinarily good for an amateur production. I can say in good conscience that it was absolutely professional. The production is on the whole better than the one in Cape Town, though of course there are some problems … But the most important thing is that the message of the play comes across perfectly and doesn’t miss its mark in the audience.”

  He also didn’t miss a chance to ask about the diary’s sales in all the various cities he visited. Everywhere the play was performed, the diary also sold well, he wrote. “In Santiago, they also sold a lot of copies in German, since there is a large German colony there. In Brazil, I saw it displayed in Spanish.”

  In June he describes his apprehension about Bogotá, which lay more than 8,000 feet above sea level. He remembered only too well the serious problems he had had in Mexico City because of the altitude. And then came a sentence that showed how homesick he felt: “Even though I really do like it in South America, I’ve had enough, and I miss Herbstgasse and Switzerland terribly. [In English:] There’s nothing like it!!”

  He had had enough of hotels, of living out of a suitcase, of restaurant meals and strange beds. In Bogotá he rented a small apartment, which he was doing more and more frequently whenever the troupe had a longer stay somewhere. “It’s good to get out of the hotels for a while and eat some home cooking again,” he wrote home. “I’m sharing the apartment with Denny (I live in sin!!) and she’s totally involved in the apartment too.”

  And yet barely two months later they were already in Colombia, in Medellín. Leni had written her son a letter from Sils-Maria, and Buddy had such a strong reaction that he went around crushed for a day or two. He was battling against homesickness, against his memories. He saw before his eyes the beautiful house, the park with the swing, and thought about how lovely and carefree those weeks were that he had spent there with Anne. They had played hide-and-seek and never dreamed that the game of hiding would one day turn deadly serious. They had still believed that the future lay before them like a picture book with one brightly colored page after another, and that they had only to turn the pages, rest their finger on something, and say, “That, there”—and it would happen. But it had all turned out so differently. Buddy sat down at the desk, in a hotel room that was as boring and arbitrary as every other one, and nothing compared to the elegant, well-furnished rooms at Villa Laret, and he wrote: “Many thanks for Leni’s letter from Sils. I want so much to be with you all and I’ll be there on August 1. I’m tired of traveling again and want to be home again for a few days. How I look forward to being at home.”

  In late 1958, Holiday on Ice went on a European tour, and on December 17, Buddy wrote home that they had been to Amsterdam. “With a heavy heart I visited the Prinsengracht house, where dear Miep showed us around. I didn’t know that there was so much renovation in progress. We had to clamber up a chicken ladder to get to the Annex. There are two wreaths hanging in Anne’s room from German youth groups.”

  What Buddy didn’t write was how deeply the visit upset him. It was almost fifteen years earlier that Anne had lived in this room, the kind of room that Leni would probably have described as “a dump.” He saw the photographs of movie stars that Anne had pasted to the wall above where her bed used to be, and felt a stab of pain in his heart. There was Heinz Rühmann, who throughout the war was allowed to pursue his acting career undisturbed since officially he was a “nonpolitical” star. In fact, he had divorced his Jewish wife in 1938 and appeared in numerous movies during the Nazi period because as a “national actor” he was exempt from military service. After the war, he just continued his career. Buddy felt rage and bitterness at the thought of him as he looked at the photograph and imagined how happy Anne was back then, in July 1942, when they moved into the Annex, to stick his picture on the wall in an effort to make this shabby room a little nicer.

  In January 1959, with Holiday on Ice in Frankfurt, Leni visited her son. They had not seen each other in person for a long time and were overjoyed. Leni came to the show, of course, and was happy to see how well received “Buddy and Baddy” were by the audience. As Gerti repeatedly emphasized, Leni was always very proud of her son and collected all the newspaper clippings with reviews and notices that Buddy sent home, to show them to her friends and acquaintances. When Leni went back home to Basel, Buddy wrote: “I was so happy to see you on your visit and was glad you liked the show so much.” In the same letter, he brought up a newspaper report that had made him angry: “Again the article about me has things in it that I really don’t like and that I never said. Above all I never said that Otto is blind to everything except the foundation now. I said that his life is now entirely dedicated to Anne’s work and especially to the foundation i
n Amsterdam.”

  On February 4, Buddy sent a letter to his loved ones from Frankfurt in which he describes having met Elvis Presley:

  It was really strange to see Elvis Presley. Little Joyce was beside herself. She worships him and wrote him to see if he would like to come see the show. She always said to us: If I ever see him in person, I’ll die!! Then, when he came backstage and even had his picture taken holding hands with her, the expression on her face was something to see. She was almost crying with joy and excitement. It was really moving. He spent the whole last show on Saturday backstage and brilliantly talked with everyone, and then later went back to the hotel where he plucked at least one of our girls to do justice to his manly sentiments. Sadly not our little Joyce.

  Denny, the woman Buddy was “living in sin” with in Bogotá, decided at the end of 1959 to give up show business, “not because it was too difficult for her,” Buddy wrote from Munich, “but because she couldn’t stand the constant changes of climate and food.” So there was no reason for her to go on tour again. That didn’t change his own plans, he said; he planned to keep going for two or three more years.

  In May 1960, Buddy was in Casablanca. On Otto’s birthday, he wrote: “Especially to Ottel, a heartfelt happy birthday and very best wishes for the success of the Anne Frank Foundation. I pray to God that this incredible work achieves what you, Fritzi, and countless other people are living for … I look forward to coming home and hearing all about the opening celebrations and your trip to Israel.”

  Today, Gerti, Buddy’s wife, says, “It is too bad that Buddy didn’t keep any of the letters he got from Otto. Otto wrote him so many.”

  Nineteen sixty, with Holiday on Ice back in America, was a decisive year for Buddy, who began planning his retirement from skating. In June he wrote from Miami: “So this is a memorable letter: my last from abroad … or in any case my last from my skating rink. I have 14 years behind me, the kind that are probably granted only to very few people, and you can’t imagine what’s running through my head right now. Joy, worry, hope, trust, regret, memories, fears, dreams.”