Seriously?

Perhaps it's unfair for me to pass judgment on a book I haven't read yet, but this just doesn't sound good.

From the New York Daily News:

A writer who specializes in young adult novels has penned a racy fictional diary by Peter van Pels, the boy who lived in the same building as Frank in Amsterdam while she was in hiding during the Nazi occupation.

According to London's Sunday Times, author Sharon Dogar's book, "Annexed," includes graphic descriptions of van Pels' and Franks' adolescent romance, which Frank hinted at in her actual diary, published in 1947.

Charlie Sheppard, the editorial director at Anderson Press, which will publish the book this fall, says Dogar thinks the duo slept together.

"Sharon reread and reread Anne's diaries, and is in no doubt that they were in love," she told the Times. "They also talk about sex in the diaries. After all, the hormones of both were raging."

But Buddy Elias, Frank's first cousin, has criticized "Annexed" for straying from the truth.

"Anne was not the child she is in this book," he told the U.K. newspaper. "I also do not think that their terrible destiny should be used to invent some fictitious story."

Elias learned about van Pels and Frank from her father, Otto, who survived the war and eventually published his daughter's diaries.

"From what Otto told me about Peter, he was very shy but in this book he is given a character he did not possess," he told the Times.

For her part, Dogar told the Times that she did not want to discuss the details of her book but that it was "pure conjecture" that Frank and van Pels made love."

Of course, this isn't the first time Peter van Pels has been the focus of an alternate-history novel. Ellen Feldman's The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank imagines van Pels as a post-war refugee in the U.S. whose life is turned upside-down after Anne's published diary becomes an international sensation. Apart from the obvious truth that Peter never made it out of Mauthausen alive, however, the book was pretty true to Peter's known character and loaded with pieces of Annex history. I can only hope that Dogar's book is as accurate, but her confession to writing scandalous scenes between Anne and Peter that were based on "pure conjecture" leaves me doubtful.

Nothing Anne wrote in any version of her diary indicates that she ever made it to "third base" with young Mr. van Pels, or that she would have wanted to -- "Anne's moral upbringing precluded that, as did the many things Anne objected to in Peter's character." (AF:B, p.216). Moreover, it isn't in keeping with what we know of Anne and Peter -- and, more urgently, their parents -- to imply that they weren't vigilant enough about their situation in the Annex to not risk a pregnancy. Did Dogar even read the diary?

I don't understand why so many writers feel the need to turn history into a series of dumbed-down love stories to sell books. No wonder people aren't taking Anne Frank's story seriously anymore. :(

Whatever Happened to Mary Bos?

As a child, Mary Bos was a friend of Anne Frank -- a classmate from Anne's days at the Sixth Public Montessori School. Anne apparently liked her well enough to have invited Bos to her tenth birthday party in 1939; Bos appears with the other party guests in a well-known group picture taken at the event, third from the right:


And her talent as an artist is mentioned briefly by Anne in a diary entry from 1944, the one where she records a dream about Peter Schiff -- he and Anne are "looking at a book of drawings by Mary Bos. The dream was so vivid I can even remember some of the drawings..."

While it's clear that she did survive the war, not much else has been known about her or about the circumstances of her survival. But a recent profile piece on Bos done by a newspaper in North Carolina (where Bos now lives) yields quite a bit of new information about this one-time friend of Anne Frank.

From the Hendersonville (N.C.) Times-News :

With nimble fingers, Mary Bos Schneider, 81, flipped through the photocopied pages of her school annual. She was looking for a specific page, and when she finally found it, she concentrated hard.

"Think of your school girlfriends in the past," Schneider read. "When you think of that, and these last years, think then Mary also of me."

And it's signed, "with love" by Anne Frank.

Schneider, who was known to Anne Frank as Mary Bos, was born in Amsterdam. Her mother and brother were both born in Philadelphia, but her father was a billiards champion from Holland.

From the third to the fifth grade, Schneider attended the Montessori School.

She remembered Anne as "a live wire." "Whenever she wanted to be in a group, she was in it," Schneider said. "She was almost overly active."

Schneider was in the fifth grade before she left Holland in 1940. It was years later when she came across the book The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank. The book was published in the United States.

n the middle of the night in 1939, Schneider's mother received a letter from the American Consulate telling her to leave the country. It took the family a few months to secure visas to leave because both Schneider and her father were citizens of Holland.

"I remember looking out -- my brother and I heard all this commotion out on the street," Schneider said.

We looked outside and there were soldiers, so to speak, marching on our streets, with shovels over their shoulders or rakes, not dressed and just waving at everybody. They had been mobilized. We could see them in the field learning how to be a soldier."

They had no guns or uniforms, she added.

The family finally left the country in February 1940. Schneider was 11.

"Holland was occupied four days later," Schneider said.

Schneider did not find out Anne died in the Holocaust until her diary was published. She held up the photograph of the girls at the party and pointed to a few faces.

A handful of them were Jewish and out of those, some also died in the concentration camp.

She named others who, being Christians, were able to weather the occupation of Holland. Schneider shook her head, calling the Holocaust atrocities "horrible."

On Monday, Schneider and her husband, Bob, are flying to Amsterdam to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Anne Frank House, which opened on May 3, 1960.

About two years ago, two women who work with the Anne Frank House came to Hendersonville to interview Mary about her memories of Anne Frank and her apartment.

"I remember they had very dark furniture," Schneider said. "They're trying to have the apartment look exactly the way it used to."

On Wednesday, the Anne Frank House will have an official reception to celebrate it's anniversary, and Mary Schneider and her husband will be in attendance.

Belsen Survivor's Memories of Anne Frank Draw Skepticism

Holocaust survivor Berthe Meijer, who was liberated from Bergen-Belsen at the age of seven, remembers Anne Frank as an inspired storyteller who tried to boost the spirits of the camp's youngest prisoners with fairy tales about about princes and elves as the shadow of death waited nearby. Meijer's memoir, Life After Anne Frank, is set to be published in Dutch this month; its version of Anne Frank's final weeks has already attracted some skepticism from a number of people involved with Anne Frank's story.

The Unconvinced

-- Historian David Barnouw, who contributed to the academic Critical Edition of Anne Frank's diary, dismisses Meijer's account on the grounds that "it would be an amazing coincidence that Meijer would have a memory about someone who only became well known many years later." And that, already mortally ill with typhus, Anne Frank was probably in no shape for entertaining children -- an objection also raised by Hanneli Goslar, one of Anne Frank's closest friends and one of the last people to see her alive at Belsen: "In that condition, you almost died... You had no strength to tell stories."

-- The Dutch filmmaker Willy Lindwer didn't include Meijer in his documentary The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, which features interviews with several women who knew Anne Frank in the camps, because he found her testimony too vague to be credible: "Berthe... had not more than a very vague recollection of this concentration camp," he said in an emailed message to the Associated Press. “She recalled the image of an older girl who told stories to younger children. It may have been Anne Frank, but also maybe not. Very vague.”

On the other hand...

-- Records obtained by the Associated Press from Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust documentation authority, prove that Berthe Meijer was indeed a prisoner at Bergen-Belsen for 13 months -- including the time Anne Frank was held at the camp -- until liberation in the spring of 1945.

-- Meijer says she and her family knew the Franks before they went into hiding: they were all German-Jewish refugees living in the same South Amsterdam neighborhood, with Berthe's family living on Niersstraat, where Anne Frank attended the Sixth Public Montessori School.

-- The Anne Frank House itself stands by the claims made in Meijer's memoir. A spokesperson for the institution says that Meijer has already been interviewed by a number of museum historians about her memories of Anne Frank, and they have no cause to doubt her recollections -- "It could very well be true."

Of course it could. But what to make of all this?

I'm certain that, whatever really went down at Bergen-Belsen, Berthe Meijer isn't deliberately misleading people in order to sell books. There are a few notoriously fraudulent Holocaust memoirs out there, to be sure -- Wilkomirski's Fragments and that book about a girl who survived the Holocaust by living with a pack of wolves come to mind -- but their authors had no experience whatsoever with the subjects they wrote about. Meijers is a documented survivor, someone who endured the hell of Belsen at a young age and presumably understands the gravity of her past well enough to avoid lying about it. Maybe she really does believe Anne Frank told her stories there, but this is impossible to verify, and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't happen at all. In the end, we'll probably never know one way or another.

U.S. Congress Honors Miep Gies With a Bill

At the end of February, Congress unanimously passed a resolution that paid tribute to the life of Miep Gies, recognizing her courage in helping to hide the Franks and in preserving Anne's diary after the Nazis raided the Annex.

The bill's sponsor, Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy, spoke in Congress on behalf of the resolution:

Why is it important to honor Miep Gies?

I recently visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. It is an overwhelming experience, and as we ponder the horror of Hitler's plan to eradicate the Jewish people, we ask ourselves: How could this have happened? How could so many stand by silently? How could so many actually participate?

So it is important, I think, to understand that there are some who spoke up, heroes like Miep Gies, and it is important to honor people like her, people who helped the Jews, who worked against the sea of hatred that had enveloped most of Europe at that time--people like Miep Gies, an ordinary woman, who did an extraordinary thing.

She was born to a German Catholic family in Austria on February 15, 1909. When she was 11, her family sent her to live with a foster family in the Netherlands to escape food shortages in postwar Austria. She worked as a servant, as a seamstress, as waitress. Then, in 1933, she took a job with an Amsterdam manufacturing company owned by Otto Frank, a German Jew, who left Frankfurt when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and when the organized attacks on the Jews began, including the boycott on
Jewish businesses.

Ms. Gies quickly became friends with the Frank family. On July 6, 1942, more than 2 years into the German occupation of the Netherlands, Otto Frank; his wife, Edith; and his daughters, Margot and Anne, went into hiding in a secret annex behind a bookshelf in Otto Frank's office. They were later joined by Hermann and Auguste Van Pels; their son, Peter; and Fritz Pfeffer.

For 2 more years, Miep Gies, along with her husband, Jan, and three other employees of Otto Frank, risked their lives to supply the eight people in hiding with food, clothing, with news from the outside, and with paper for Anne to write on.

As Anne noted in her diary, ``Miep has so much to carry; she looks like a pack mule. She goes forth nearly every day, scrounging for vegetables, and then bicycles back with her purchases in large shopping bags.''

Miep is also the one who brought five library books to Anne every Saturday. She did this during a time of war. It [Page: H675]
was a time of shortages, a time when getting food meant managing ration coupons. Despite their efforts, though, on August 4, 1944, the Gestapo raided the secret hiding place, and they captured the eight hideaways who were betrayed by an anonymous tip.

Miep Gies discovered the pages of the diary that Anne kept during her time in hiding, and Miep locked them in a desk drawer for safekeeping. When she learned that Margot and Anne had died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, she returned Anne's diary to Otto Frank, the only one of the eight to have survived the Holocaust.

As was noted, she passed away recently, on January 11, 2010, at the age of 100, but she kept alive a very important part of Holocaust history by preserving Anne's diary and by helping us to learn, to understand and to remember so it will not happen again.

Thanks to Miep Gies' bravery, Anne's recollections have been preserved for future generations. Miep later described her efforts to assist the eight people in hiding, saying, ``Of course, it's nice to be appreciated, but I only did my duty to my fellow man. I helped people in need. Anyone can do that, can't they?''

This understated appraisal of her heroic acts is just one example of her modesty and her integrity. We can learn much from Miep Gies, an ordinary woman, who showed extraordinary courage in the face of unspeakable peril during Nazi occupation and the Holocaust. She is a powerful symbol of resistance against oppression and injustice. She is an example of our human capacity to rise even to the most daunting of challenges.

I urge my colleagues to join me in recognizing this incredible woman's life and legacy.

You can see video of this speech, along with the rest of the text, here.

The Many Afterlives of Anne Frank

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch explores a handful of the numerous identities Anne Frank has had in the afterlife:

ANNE, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

This is the version that Goodrich and Hackett advanced in their spectacularly successful drama, which won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. The writers, a married couple whose earlier hits included "Father of the Bride" and "It's a Wonderful Life," took their direction from Anne's father, Otto Frank, the only one of the Jews who hid in the Amsterdam annex to survive the death camps.

Frank no doubt had his reasons for wanting to portray his wife and daughters in a golden light. But the distinguished writer Cynthia Ozick disdains any effort to help Broadway audiences identify with the teenager and her family.

In the play, "Anne became an all-American girl, an echo of the perky character in 'Junior Miss,'" Ozick wrote in a New Yorker essay.

The play emphasized Anne's relationship to Peter, the teenage boy in hiding with the Franks, and depicted the Franks as a consistently loving, cheerful family.

That sounds banal but, just 10 years after the war, this approach may have made sense.

"This play is about the 1950s," said Washington University drama professor Henry Schvey, who last semester taught a class in theater and the Holocaust. "It's nonthreatening and uplifting. That's all audiences wanted to hear, if they were willing to hear anything about the Holocaust at all. It made a contribution. But like anything else, it's a product of its times."

ANNE, THE ROMANTIC

Anne loved the movies, even favoring one photo of herself because she thought it made her look like an actress. With her big dark eyes and captivating smile, she's inspired others to see her in that romantic light, too.

Teenage girls in a number of movies and TV shows have explicitly identified with her; the indie rock group Neutral Milk Hotel salutes her, "the only girl I've ever loved," in the song "Holland 1945."

In "The Ghost Writer" by Philip Roth, an Anne Frank-like character on a New England campus in the early 1950s inspires an admirer to wonder who she really is.

ANNE, THE WRITER

This is the way a lot of people get to know Anne Frank, and it's the way she wanted people to see her. In her diary, she dreams of a writing career.

In fact, she intended the diary to be read by others, and revised sections of it herself with that in mind. Novelist Francine Prose, in her thoughtful book "Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife," examines the diary with a critical eye and comes away impressed:

"The greatest book ever written about a thirteen-year-old girl is Anne Frank's diary … a consciously crafted work of literature." Of course, she adds, we would gladly do without the diary if Anne and those like her had lived. "But none of us was given that choice, and the diary is what we have left."

ANNE, THE VICTIM

The Jews who hid in the annex to Otto Frank's factory — the Franks, the Van Pels family and a dentist — were protected by the heroic Miep Gies and a couple of other gentile friends for two years. The two years of confinement were horrible, but the worst was to come. In August 1944, someone, never identified, sold them out to the Gestapo for about $8. Seven months later, Anne and her sister Margot, starving and terrified, died of typhus within days of each other at Bergen-Belsen. V-E Day was a couple of months away.

ANNE, THE FREEDOM FIGHTER

Never happened, except in fiction. Excluding anti-Semitic crudities that exploit her life and death, probably the most bizarre version of Anne Frank's story showed up on TV's "Robot Chicken," a stop-action video in which a blond Anne fights Nazis, wins and cuddles with her cute boyfriend Peter on a bridge over a canal.

"Nazis are so uncool," she murmurs.

The reference is to this, an obvious parody of cliches in teen films and Hollywood's dumbed-down versions of historical events.

Anyway, continued:

The little opus is so bizarre it defies interpretation, but Schvey finds that it comports neatly with a major strain in Holocaust writing about women: "They are either entirely innocent, like Anne, or entirely heroic, like (poet-paratrooper) Hannah Senesh. There's no nuance."

In other words, Anne becomes her own flip side.

ANNE, THE IDEALIST

"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

This is the most famous quotation from Anne Frank's diary, the one emblazoned on the cover of many editions. It's perhaps the line, and certainly the spirit, that Eleanor Roosevelt had in mind when she wrote, in her 1952 introduction, that the diary "makes poignantly clear the ultimate shining nobility of the (human) spirit."

Otto Frank had already edited the diary to ensure that kind of reading, eliminating passages that, he thought, revealed too much (Anne's fights with her mother, her discussion of her period; the text has since been restored). Understandably, he wanted Anne, his dead child, to stand as a symbol of hope and the triumph of the human spirit.

But increasingly, that view has come to seem willfully naive to some people — including playwright Kesselman.

The famous quote is taken out of context, she says. It's still in the play, but in a different way. The overall tone is different, too.

Like Rosenfeld, the Indiana University professor, Kesselman thinks that the effort to glean a hopeful, "universal" message from Anne Frank's life and work comes at an unacceptably high price: denying who Anne Frank really was and why she died.

ANNE, THE JEW

Rosenfeld says many have tried to describe other girls wounded by politics or war as the "Anne Frank" of their particular groups. He thinks that's wrong, and he holds the play to blame.

"I don't think that Goodrich and Hackett did it maliciously, but they de-Judaized Anne," he said, and in so doing, they diluted her story.

In Nazi-occupied Holland, where being Jewish was a status crime punishable by death, Anne was not Jewish incidentally. It was the central fact of her short, hard life.

If you can't appreciate what that means, Rosenfeld cautions, then you really can't appreciate Anne Frank.

Notes on a Controversy

A curious incident from Virginia involving the Definitive Edition of the diary should serve as a reminder of how much Anne Frank and her story are still able to stir up emotions and spark debate:

Culpeper County public school officials have decided to stop assigning a version of Anne Frank's diary, one of the most enduring symbols of the atrocities of the Nazi regime, after a parent complained that the book includes sexually explicit material and homosexual themes.

"The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition," which was published on the 50th anniversary of Frank's death in a concentration camp, will not be used in the future, said James Allen, director of instruction for the 7,600-student system.

The version of the diary in question includes passages previously excluded from the widely read original edition... Some of the extra passages detail her emerging sexual desires; others include unflattering descriptions of her mother and other people living together.

Allen said that the more recent version will remain in the school library and that the earlier version will be used in classes. The 1955 play based on Frank's experiences also has been a part of the eighth-grade curriculum for many years.

(It has since been reported that the Definitive Edition will be reinstated as a classroom text at the above-mentioned school.)

The Definitive Edition has been a lightning rod for controversy since its inception: In her landmark biography of Anne Frank, Melissa Müller called the book "problematic" for "carelessly mixing" Anne's original diary entries (version A) with her later revisions (version B) without identifying them as such; others have attacked the book for reinstating deeply intimate passages that Anne herself had edited out in 1944. And Holocaust scholar Alvin Rosenfeld has taken issue with the title of the book: what right do publishers have to label any version of the Diary "definitive" given that the author "did not live long enough to complete such a book, nor did she authorize others to finalize a version in her name."

Personally speaking, the Definitive Edition has always been my favorite edition of the diary. It was the first version I ever read. I found a mirror of my own ambivalence in the deeply intimate entries where Anne tracks her physical and emotional development, and in the caustic observations of her relationship with her mother I found reassuring evidence that others felt the same way about their parents that I did about mine. And it underscores in the most poignant way the point that, even in hiding for her life from "the cruelest monsters ever to stalk the earth", Anne Frank was still an adolescent girl and totally human. The Anne of the original edition is sanitized, polished, and not nearly as accessible; classroom lessons revolving around that book shortchange students and make it harder for them to identify with her -- and thus harder for them to grasp the personal dimension of the Holocaust.

Still, the decision to remove the Definitive Edition doesn't approach anything close to Holocaust censorship. The diary in general was never banned from the school, and forcing comparisons between this episode and Nazi book burnings cheapens history. The school in question simply chose to rely on the older edition of the diary, which is the one that most schools use to teach kids about Anne Frank -- that is, when they're even using the actual diary at all. (My eighth-grade teacher didn't; instead, she had us read excerpts from the Goodrich-Hackett play, and then she showed us Anne Frank: The Whole Story; seeing both confused nearly everyone in my class.)

And. finally, the Definitive Edition is not "the unabridged edition" -- there is no such thing. Even the Critical Edition, which features both of Anne Frank's diary drafts alongside the published version, is missing a few lines at the request of the Frank family (over privacy concerns).

Frank Family Emigration Plans Illuminated: Notes from the Straus Historical Society

A few years ago, a file with documents chronicling Otto Frank's desperate attempts to to escape with his family from the Nazi-occupied Netherlands in 1941 was found in New York at the YIVO archives. A noteworthy article from the Straus Historical Society Newsletter describes many of these documents in detail and provides much insight into the obstacles Jewish refugees faced in finding a safe haven. It also sheds light onto the enduring friendship between Frank and his college friend Nathan Straus, Jr. -- then head of the U.S. Housing Authority -- who spearheaded the campaign to bring the Franks over, in spite of the paper walls set up by the antisemitic U.S. State Department.

On Otto Frank's often-criticized decision to stay in the Netherlands, the article points out that:

It is easy to wonder from the prospective of 2007 why Otto
Frank and his family... remained in the Netherlands while conditions there were deteriorating. David Engel, the Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at New York University compared the correspondence to a blind chess game where the rules kept changing. He states, "Understanding the situation of the Jews in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation, like understanding any aspect of the Holocaust, requires suspension of hindsight." While Jews were being deprived of their property and livelihood and becoming more socially isolated, they continued to live in relative security. In other words, in Otto Frank's case, neither the push nor the pull factors were as strong in 1940-41 as they had been in 1933. Hence 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 life as a double refugee in a new country, even if a new country could be found."

We also learn more about the efforts of the small network of people and agencies in the U.S. who worked tirelessly to secure the Franks' escape from Europe: the influential Straus family, Edith Frank's recently arrived brothers, and National Refugee Service director Augusta Mayerson, among others, tried to maneuver around the strict and ever-changing State Department immigration guidelines.

At the time one needed an affidavit from someone in the States willing to sponsor him as well as a trust fund placed in his name. Recognizing that a relative would have more influence than a family friend, Nathan [Straus] suggested that Edith Frank's two brothers, Julius and Walter Holländer, who were living in Massachusetts, would more likely meet with a favorable result if they sponsored the Franks. The Boston Committee for Refugees was contacted... Since both brothers had only recently immigrated, and did not have sufficient income to show they could support the Frank family, Nathan offered to put up the necessary money. There was concern that too many people wanted to be sponsored at the same time. Julius and Walter's two employers submitted affidavits of support for Margot and Anne. Julius and Walter would sponsor their mother, Rosa Holländer, who was living with the Franks. On June 11th Nathan sponsored Otto and Edith.

And about how frustrating and convoluted the road to escape eventually became:

The Nazis forced the American consulates in their sphere of influence to close down, which meant that the Franks would have to book passage (proof of which was necessary for obtaining an American visa) from a neutral European country with an open American consulate and a harbor on the Atlantic. So Otto Frank decided to try for Portugal -- an option that failed because he needed transit visas through Belgium and France, as well as permission from the Nazis to leave Holland, all of which wouldn't be granted if Frank couldn't produce an entry visa from another country.

Nathan wrote to Otto on September 11th, "I am prepared to submit the necessary affidavits of support just as soon as you are able to assure me that you can leave Holland and get permission to go to a country where there is an American Consul."

Then came the State Department rule that potential refugees whose close relatives were still living in German-occupied countries weren't eligible for a visa: Either all five of the Franks had to get entry permits at the same time, which was virtually impossible even for someone with Otto Frank's connections, or they couldn't leave the Netherlands at all.

Which is when Otto tried Plan B: obtaining incredibly expensive Cuban tourist visas that would allow him and his family to wait their turn for American visas in the relative safety of the Western Hemisphere.

Letters throughout November work out the details of how Otto Frank could obtain the Cuban visa. The Strauses agreed to arrange the bond and pay for transportation costs. The Holländer brothers would pay the attorney fees, visa fees and outgoing passage fees from Cuba. Ms. Mayerson wrote to Julius Holländer on November 12th, "It takes from ten to twenty-one days to obtain a legal Cuban visa. We have recently been informed that persons in occupied areas are being denied exit permits. It may be therefore that even after the Franks have obtained Cuban visas they may fail to obtain the necessary exit permits from Holland."

On November 18th Julius Holländer wrote to the Strauses, "The National Refugee Service, Inc. informed me on November 12 of your decision to contribute in a generous way to the immigration of Mr. Otto Frank and family. ... The most important issue for the time being is the providing of the exit permits. Because I was advised not to pay for the Cuban Visa before I would be informed by my brother-in-law that exit permits would be granted, I sent a cable to Amsterdam asking him to make sure that the permits are available." He then wrote to the National Refugee Service on the 22nd, "Whereupon I cabled again to make positively sure, that exit permits would be given, before I would be able to deposit amount for visas and tickets." Otto Frank's travel agent in Amsterdam cabled, "Exit permit can only be given after Cuban visa is sent over. Please care only for Otto Frank for the time being to confine financial risk." On the 28th Julius Holländer ordered the Cuban exit permit.

One Cuban visa -- for Otto -- was issued at the beginning of December 1941, but it's unclear if he ever saw it. Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether he did, because a little over a week later, in the wake of Germany's declaration of war on the United States, Cuba canceled the entry permits it sent to applicants in Europe, leaving the Franks stranded in occupied Holland to await the consequences:

On June 22, 1945 a letter by G. V. Saxl of the Migration Department describes Julius Holländer's efforts to contact his family. He had been advised that they were in Paris. Apparently he did not know at that time that only Otto Frank survived. On June 26, 1945 a letter by Ann S. Petluck, director of the Migration Service states, "We have been advised that the above mentioned family reached France recently and are supposedly residing at the above address." By January 31, 1946 Ms. Petluck wrote, "... we are in receipt of a report advising us that Otto Frank is reputed to be living at 263 Prinsengroocat, Amsterdam. They mentioned that Mrs. Edith Holländer is deceased and that the daughters are still missing."