Ruth Franklin
Ghost Stories, July 4, 2022
I haven’t been able to hit 1000 words every day since then, since I’m balancing the writing with research, including trips to Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library to read through Otto Frank’s correspondence with his editors at Doubleday and to the Center for Jewish History for letters relating to Otto’s efforts to get the family to the United States in 1941, when it was still—just barely—possible for Jews to escape from Holland. Otto sent heartbreaking letters to Nathan Straus Jr., a close friend of his from their university days at Heidelberg, who was then working in the FDR administration. The U.S. immigration system was so byzantine that even Straus and his wife, confidants of the Roosevelts, had trouble navigating it. They were working on getting Otto to Cuba when the U.S. entered the war and canceled his Visa. You know the rest of the story.
In my last newsletter, I mentioned that many facts about Anne’s life are unknown and always will be, including her date of death. But there’s an important fact about her that should be widely known—and yet it’s not. Anne herself edited her diary for publication, long before her father supposedly censored it (as many have claimed). Here’s the story.
On March 28, 1944, at around 7:30 in the evening, the residents of the Secret Annex were listening to Radio Orange, the broadcast service of the Dutch government-in-exile in London, when Gerrit Bolkestein, minister of education, arts and sciences, came on to deliver a special address announcing the planned creation of a national archive of material relating to the war years.