The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(25)
In December, De Winter had fallen ill and been sent to the hospital barrack, where she had encountered Mrs. Frank. She told Otto that Edith was delirious, no longer eating. When she was given food, she hid it under her blanket, saying she was saving it for her husband. Eventually it went rancid.4 De Winter told him that Edith had died of starvation on January 6, 1945. Otto’s heart must have cracked.
On the train to Czernowitz in the Ukraine, at one of the frequent stops, among the hundreds milling on the platform Otto was recognized by a girl who had used to play with Anne on the Merwedeplein in the River Quarter. The girl introduced him to her mother, who immediately asked if he’d encountered her son and husband, who were still missing. Her name was Elfriede “Fritzi” Geiringer.
On March 5, after reaching Czernowitz, Otto boarded a Russian troop train heading for Odessa. It was the only way back to Amsterdam, where he hoped to be reunited with his children. He and Fritzi Geiringer parted as strangers, but eight years later she would become his second wife. Such was the outrageous level of chance controlling their lives.
It took Otto three months to make it back to Amsterdam. On June 3, he arrived at the apartment of Miep and Jan Gies. Miep recalled: “We looked at each other. There were no words. . . . ‘Miep,’ he said quietly, ‘Edith is not coming back. . . . But I have great hope for Anne and Margot.’”5 The couple invited him to live with them. He accepted.
That night, they told Otto that both Kleiman and Kugler had survived. At Camp Amersfoort Kleiman had suffered a gastric hemorrhage. The Netherlands Red Cross had intervened on humanitarian grounds, and on September 18, he had been freed. Such an appeal could work only for a Dutch citizen and only because the prospect of losing the war made the anxious German command more accommodating. Soon the Germans would be bulldozing the extermination camps to hide the evidence.
Kugler had been shuffled from one labor camp to another. On March 28, 1945, during a forced march to Germany, British Spitfires had attacked the column of about six hundred men just as they were approaching the German border. In the chaos, Kugler had managed to escape with another prisoner, making his way home with the assistance of friendly Dutch farmers. By that time, the Germans were too busy saving themselves in a mass retreat back to the fatherland to be interested in hunting down Dutch escapees.6
On Monday, June 4, Otto wrote in the agenda he always kept that he’d returned to Prinsengracht 263. It must have been shockingly painful to see the map on the wall on which he’d tracked the Allied advance; the ruler near the door measuring how much his daughters had grown; the pictures of babies, film stars, and the Dutch royal family that Anne had tacked up in her bedroom. Nothing had changed, yet everything had changed. Five days after his return, he wrote to his mother that he didn’t feel like himself yet. It was as if he were moving in a trance, and he wasn’t able to keep his balance.7
His wife was dead. He’d watched Hermann van Pels walk toward the gas chamber at Auschwitz the previous October. He had no news of his daughters, Peter, Fritz, or Mrs. van Pels. But he still hoped. His daughters might be in the Russian-occupied territory in Germany, from which communication was notoriously slow. Survivors were still returning to the Netherlands.
And then the news came. He received an official letter from a nurse in Rotterdam saying his daughters were dead. But he couldn’t simply accept that. He needed it confirmed by an eyewitness. On July 18, with the assistance of the Red Cross, he tracked down twenty-eight-year-old Janny Brilleslijper. He knew she’d been imprisoned with his daughters in Bergen-Belsen. She recalled:
In the summer of 1945, a tall, thin, distinguished man stood on the sidewalk. He looked through our window. . . . There stood Otto Frank. He asked if I knew what had happened to his two daughters. I knew, but it was hard to get the words out of my mouth. . . . I had to tell him that his children were no more.8
Around that time, information arrived regarding the fate of the others. Fritz Pfeffer had died on December 20, 1944, in Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany. Although Otto had tried to persuade Peter van Pels to stay behind with him in the infirmary, Peter had believed he would have a better chance on the death march to evacuate Auschwitz, which the Nazis had ordered on January 19 as the Russian Army had approached. He had survived the weeklong march but died in the sick barracks of Mauthausen on May 5, two days before Germany’s unconditional surrender.9 According to an eyewitness who testified before the Red Cross, Nazi soldiers had thrown his mother, Auguste, under a train during a transport to Theresienstadt.10
Otto was told that he had been lucky to survive. But what was luck? He had lost everything. He kept sane by trying to rebuild his spice business, which proved to be impossible since spices from Indonesia were no longer available, and by helping to reunite orphaned children with their relatives.
He wrote his mother that he’d visited Jetteke Frijda, Margot’s school friend from the Jewish Lyceum, which they’d attended together after Jewish children had been banned from Dutch public schools. Jetteke was all alone. Her father and brother were dead. Her mother was in Switzerland.11 There was such overwhelming need; sometimes it was too much. Yet he did what he could to help.
“He became my father from there on; he took care of everything,” Hanneli Goslar, another orphan, said of Otto Frank.12 Her parents had been friends of the Franks in Amsterdam, and she had been one of Anne’s closest friends at school. Her mother had died in childbirth in 1942, and her father and maternal grandparents had been murdered in Bergen-Belsen.