[lit-ideas] National Security
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 03:55:56 EST
_Click here: Frank father sent aid pleas to U.S. - CNN.com_
(http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/02/14/frank.letters.ap/index.html)
Frank father sent aid pleas to U.S.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Anne Frank's father sent desperate letters to friends and
family in the United States pleading for financial assistance to help the
family escape from the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, according to papers released
Wednesday.
"I would not ask if conditions here would not force me to do all I can in
time to be able to avoid worse," Otto Frank wrote to his college friend Nathan
Straus in April 1941. "It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have
to care for. Our own fate is of less importance."
The letters, along with documents and records from various agencies that
helped people immigrate from Europe, were released by the YIVO Institute for
Jewish Research.
The information documents how Frank tried to arrange for his family -- wife
Edith, daughters Margo and Anne and mother-in-law Rosa Hollander -- to go to
the United States or Cuba.
Frank wrote to relatives, friends and officials between April 30, 1941, and
December 11, 1941, when Germany declared war on the United States. He tried
to arrange U.S. visas for his family before they went into hiding, but his
efforts were hampered by restrictive immigration policies designed to protect
national security, Holocaust experts said.
He referred to those problems in his letters.
"I know that it will be impossible for us all to leave even if most of the
money is refundable, but Edith urges me to leave alone or with the children,"
he said in another letter to Straus.
Frank first applied for immigration visas to the U.S. for himself and his
family in 1938, reviving his efforts in 1941 -- a move that may seem lax with
what is now known about the Holocaust, but was logical to Frank at the time.
"He preferred what seemed to him like the nuisances that encumbered an
otherwise comfortable life under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands to the
insecurity of a life as a double refugee in a new country, even if a new
country
could have been found," said David Engel, a professor of Holocaust studies at
New York University.
Frank was unable to secure passage to the U.S. There were nearly 300,000
names on a waiting list for an immigration visa. Also, since Frank had living
relatives in Germany, he would have been unable to emigrate under strict
immigration policies.
Frank's attempt to move his family mirrors thousands of German Jews, said
Richard Breitman, an American University professor who focuses on German and
American intelligence history.
"Frank's case was unusual only in that he tried hard very late -- and
enjoyed particularly good or fortunate American connections. Still, he
failed,"
Breitman said.
YIVO, a New York-based institution that focuses on the history and culture
of Eastern European Jews, discovered the file among 100,000 other
Holocaust-related documents about a year and a half ago. The institute did not
immediately disclose the find because it had to explore copyright and other
legal
issues, said Cathy Callegari, a spokeswoman for YIVO.
Frank's attempts to arrange a route out of the Netherlands were
unsuccessful. The family took refuge in July 1942, hiding for more than two
years before
being arrested.
Anne Frank described the family's life in hiding in a diary that has sold an
estimated 75 million copies. The Frank family's hiding place in a secret
annex in an Amsterdam canal-side warehouse has been turned into a museum.
The letters were initially held by the New York City-based Hebrew Immigrant
Aid Society, which gradually transferred its archives to the YIVO Institute
in 1974.
Callegari said that the HIAS archives consisted of documents from various
agencies so that the true origin of the Otto Frank letters may never be known.
She said a volunteer archivist at the YIVO Institute discovered Otto Frank's
letters about a year and a half ago.
The Anne Frank foundation hopes to obtain the papers, but there have been no
discussions about that, said spokeswoman Teresien da Silva. "We'd like to
have every original paper related to the Frank family. But we don't know what
the outcome will be," she said.
Anne Frank died of typhus at age 15 in a concentration camp at
Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945. Her father returned to the Netherlands to
collect his
daughter's notes and published them in the Netherlands in 1947.
Time magazine first reported on the newly discovered documents on its Web
site last week.
Copyright 2007 The _Associated Press_
(http://www.cnn.com/interactive_legal.html#AP) . All rights reserved.This
material may not be published, broadcast,
rewritten, or redistributed.
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