Going to the Anne Frank house here in Amsterdam, as I did last week, is an adventure, to say the least. Much has been written about Anne Frank the person and the story and the mark she and her little book left on the world. Her Diary, published in Dutch in 1947 and in English in 1952, has been edited and annotated multiple times, initially by Anne herself, then by her father, then by others. It’s been translated into 60 languages and is one of the best-selling and most influential books in the twentieth century. It’s been turned into Broadway plays, off-Broadway plays, Hollywood movies, and off-Hollywood movies. The Anne Frank Foundation has maintained and restored the Anne Frank House, which has received over 1.2 million visits in 2017, and developed far-reaching educational materials on prejudice and tolerance used in schools and special-purpose programs around the world.

But I have my own, very personal, Anne Frank story.

I have a history with Anne, whom I often think of as a sister. It could have been that way. My home in Amsterdam is in the same neighborhood where she and her family and several others went into hiding in July 1942. When I’m on my rooftop I can hear the bells from the Westerkerk next door to her hiding place in the attic behind her father’s place of business at 263 Prinsengracht. It was from there that they were all rounded up by the German or Dutch Nazi forces and sent to Westerbork in Holland, and then to various death camps in the East.

All of those who had hidden in that house perished in the camps except Anne’s father Otto. By 1946 he had slowly made it back to Amsterdam, where he was presented with his daughter’s diary by Miep Gies. Miep had been the family’s guardian in hiding, running the family business and securing increasingly scarce food and necessities for the occupants in hiding. And after the war she was the guardian of all things Anne until Otto returned.

***

My mother (nee Koch) was born in 1912 in Frankfurt-am-Main, in Germany, as were her two younger brothers, and as was her mother in 1890 (nee Kahn). They lived in the West End of the city, a well-to-do district built with the flush of money following the 1870 victory over France, a neighborhood made famous in Sylvia Tannenbaum’s Yesterday’s Streets. When my grandfather died shortly after returning home from service in the Great War as a cavalry officer in the Kaiser’s army, he left my grandmother a young, beautiful widow with three young children.

While a young, beautiful widow, my grandmother was “shown interest” by a young handsome bachelor named Otto Frank, a neighbor in the West End. When this interest was not sufficiently returned, Otto moved on, and eventually married Edith Hollander, and together they had two children, Margot and Anne (born 1929), both in Frankfurt. My grandmother and Otto remained friends; if my memory of family story-telling serves, he attended my grandmother’s second wedding, and my grandmother attended Otto’s wedding to Edith.

Otto was a successful businessman, and when Hitler came to power he saw the writing on the wall. He made plans to move his family and business to Amsterdam where he had connections. They moved in early 1934 to the recently developed and comfortable Rivierenbuurt neighborhood, where the children lived happy and safe lives.

But in May 1940 the Nazis invaded Holland by surprise and extorted its surrender within five days by totally destroying Rotterdam from the air and threatening the same for the rest of the country. This began a cycle of occupation, resistance, reprisals and more brutal occupation. The installed Nazi government began to strip Jews of rights and property with the same persistent and ever-escalating force they had pursued in Germany a few years earlier. This shattering use of raw power is given a remarkable presentation in Amsterdam’s Resistance Museum, an excellent exhibition presented from the Dutch national perspective.

When Margot received an order in early July 1942 to report for German labor camp, Otto unveiled to his family his plans for living a life in hiding — hopefully for only a brief time, until the end of a war in which Germany is pushed out and defeated by the Allied forces. By the next day he had moved his family into a well-hidden space in the building to the rear of the family business (the “Achterhuis”). With the help of close business staff, Otto had prepared space for such a life, moving in a few pieces of furniture, a minimal kitchen, school materials for his two daughters, and a small collection of diversionary books and pictures on the walls. The Frank family, along with another family, the van Pels (named van Daam in the diary, with son Peter), and then later a dentist they wanted to help, lived there in mounting fear (they’d heard the news of death camps, and every passing troop patrol raised the tension), remaining hidden for more than two years until early August 1944 when they were discovered, captured, and sent by cattle car to their deaths in the last months and weeks of the war.

Also in these last weeks and months, Germany squeezed the lifeblood out of all Holland, affecting 4.5 million and causing 22,000 to die of starvation in that winter, until May 1945 when Canadian forces were finally able to break through the retreating, weakening German lines, and liberate Amsterdam and the north of the Netherlands.

***

But what if my grandmother had returned Otto’s interest, and they’d married? There are some interesting semi-plausible story lines to pursue. Maybe they would have had children, though of course they wouldn’t literally be Margot and Anne. And my mother, already born, would have been their half-sister.

And what if my mother, as a 22-year old, had moved with them to Amsterdam in 1934? Instead she moved to Paris “to study,” and met my father, whom she married in 1936 in Cologne, my father’s city. They – my parents – increasingly felt the heat of Nazification, and strongly considered relocating to Amsterdam. They had visited the city, had lined up work, and begun Dutch lessons. Maybe they would have even gone into hiding with the Franks, who were, in this not implausible scenario, family. I wasn’t born until March 1944, my parents choosing to wait for greater safety, but I could have been born in Amsterdam in 1944, and if I’d managed the unlikely feat of being born in that hiding place, there I’d be with my brand new 15-year-older Aunt not-Anne! And I’d have shared the same fate.

That’s just a couple of “what-ifs” away from reality, and I can truthfully say that when I first toured the Anne Frank House with my mother in 1998, she kept saying “It could have been us.”

***

Years after the war – not that many, actually – our high school drama teacher chose to produce “Diary of a Young Girl,” a play created for Broadway from Anne’s diary.

And as fate would have it, yours truly was cast in the role of Otto Frank.

The play opens to a dark stage and the sounds of the church bells in the Westerkerk tower pealing next door. The lights come up slowly, and there I am, standing in the doorway of our place of exile for the first time since my family has been led away. I look around, barely able to take in the scene, when my eyes light on Anne’s diary on the floor. The story begins, with Anne reading off-stage from her journal…

And there, in my high school gymnasium’s audience, were not only my parents, but also my Omi, my grandmother! There she was, now 70 years old, watching her first grandchild, born in the US of A, up on stage playing the part of her once-friend-and-almost-boyfriend-and-husband, Otto!

We performed it two nights. I was still too young to fully comprehend the bizarre magnificence of that moment – my parents and my grandmother were also struck to the point of speechlessness — but I knew it was powerful.

Anne’s last line in the play is the linchpin for the entire theatrical production, giving it its moral heft. (Actually, a search on-line or a read of her diary reveals many exquisite thoughts from sister Anne.) As she’s being led off, her disembodied voice reads the line from her journal that most people remember and somehow connect with: “In the end, in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” And my last line, delivered immediately afterwards in a genuinely shaky voice, “She puts me to shame,” has also stayed with me ever since.

For an excellent presentation of the Anne Frank story, I recommend “Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife,” by Francine Prose, 2009. 

Westerkerk Tower in the distance (.5km) from my rooftop