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Otto Frank's secrets remain hidden

Sunday, May 04, 2003

By Len Barcousky, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Central Station in Amsterdam is a Victorian wedding cake of a building. Otto and Edith Frank and their daughters, Margot and Anne, had begun and ended many trips on its railway platforms.

	"The Hidden Life of Otto Frank" By Carol Ann Lee. Morrow ($26.95)

On Aug. 8, 1944, they began their final journey there as a family.

Janny Brilleslijper also was a prisoner waiting on the platform that day, and she remembered the Franks: "A very worried father and a nervous mother and two children wearing sports-type clothes and backpacks."

The Frank family and four friends had been arrested by Dutch Nazis and German Ges-tapo a few days earlier. They had been betrayed after more than two years in hiding above the family business at 263 Prinsengracht. All were sent to Auschwitz.

Edith died there. Weakened by months of abuse, Margot and Anne were moved to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Both died within a few days of each other in March 1945. Margot had just turned 19, and Anne was 15.

Only Otto survived to return to Amsterdam. There he would edit and then oversee translation and publication of Anne's diaries.

It was Anne's writing, published in English as "The Diary of a Young Girl," that first put a human face on the Holocaust, transforming horrifying statistics into fascinating, feuding, flawed individuals.

Carol Ann Lee, a British writer who lives in Amsterdam, thinks she knows who turned in Anne and her family: a Dutch Nazi named Anton "Tonny" Ahlers. She also has found circumstantial evidence that Ahlers had blackmailed Frank on two occasions.

She didn't persuade me on either point, but nevertheless, she has produced an absorbing if not totally satisfying biography about Otto Frank. Lee previously had written "Roses From the Earth," a biography of Anne Frank.

Any careful reader of Anne's diary realizes that her relationship with her father was critical. I hoped Lee might provide insight into how Frank managed to nurture the self-confidence, clear-eyed vision and aesthetic sensibility that makes his young daughter's memoir of life in hiding so gripping.

Lee offers little on that question.

The "secret life" of the title refers to attempts by Ahlers to squeeze money out of Frank by revealing his firm's sales to the German army.

Born in Frankfurt into a wealthy banking family, Frank was an assimilated Jew who served as an officer in the Kaiser's army during World War I. A world traveler, he earlier had worked in the United States at Macy's. The family bank failed to withstand the triple blows of World War I, post-war German economic collapse and the Great Depression.

After Hitler came to power, Frank sought safety for his family in the Netherlands, which for centuries had provided sanctuary for Jews and which had remained neutral during World War I.

The Netherlands proved only a temporary refuge. After the Germans invaded in May 1940, the occupation government passed a series of increasingly onerous anti-Jewish laws. Lee provides a legal chronology in an appendix, and it is depressing reading.

The Nazis' final step was deportation of more than 100,000 Jews living in the Netherlands to death camps. Only one in 20 -- about 5,000 people -- came back.

Another 25,000 Jews hid during the war. Although about 9,000 were caught, almost two out of three who had the courage, foresight and means to go into hiding survived.

So the odds favored Frank and his family when they disappeared into their secret annex in July 1942. In was there that Anne began her remarkable diaries and eventually began to rewrite them.

It is likely that too much time has passed ever to get a definitive answer to the question of who betrayed the Frank family. The Dutch government tried to find out several times and now is looking into the Ahlers connection.

Documentary evidence is slim. Although the Germans paid bounties to those who turned in Jews, no record of a reward has been found in the Frank case. The man who took the call from the Franks' betrayer killed himself in 1945.

Ahlers was briefly jailed after the war, but he lived out his days a free man. He died at 83 in 2000.

The Frank-Ahlers relationship was a strange one.

Lee writes that in April 1941, Frank had been denounced for making anti-German remarks by one of his former employees, Joseph Jansen. Ahlers, a low-level Dutch Nazi, intercepted Jan-sen's denunciation letter and gave it to Frank.

The evidence is unclear whether Ahlers asked for money or whether Frank volunteered to pay him. In either case, Ahlers saved Frank's life. Lee believes that Frank may have continued to pay Ahlers until the family went into hiding.

When Ahlers was arrested after the war, a letter from Frank saved him from more serious punishment for his pro-Nazi activities.

Ahlers' estranged son, Anton, confirmed to Lee that he believed his father had betrayed the Franks. He also said that his father had received suspicious cash payments after Anne's diary became a worldwide best seller and the basis of a play and movie. Lee's conclusion is that Frank paid Ahlers to keep silent.

What was the secret? That Frank's firm sold pectin to the German army. Pectin, used to preserve and thicken food products, also has limited industrial and medical uses.

Maybe that was embarrassing enough to force Frank to pay hush money. But Lee writes that fully 80 percent of Dutch businesses had military contracts during the German occupation. There is, not surprisingly, no paper trail of payments to Ahlers.

Frank, who died at 91 in 1980, had said he knew who betrayed his family, but he took that secret, along with any information about blackmail, to his grave.

By book's end, I came away knowing much more about Frank's long and full life. What was most impressive was his ability to rise above both hatred and self-reproach.

But I fear that by devoting so many pages to Ahlers, Lee unwittingly offers what Israeli theologian Emil Fackenheim has called a posthumous victory to Hitler and other anti-Semites.

Ahlers, in the end, is likely to have been only a minor player in the lives of an admirable father and his extraordinary daughter.