Otto Frank died on August 19, 1980, at the age of ninety-one. On his return from Auschwitz, he’d tried to rebuild his Opekta business, but neither pectin nor spices were available after the war. By the late 1940s, his time was entirely consumed by his daughter’s diary. After he moved to Switzerland in 1952, Johannes Kleiman assumed control of the firm.
Otto and his wife, Fritzi, were committed to answering all letters they received about the diary, and with the increasing international attention, the letters soon numbered in the thousands. Otto often traveled to Amsterdam to preside over the Anne Frank Foundation, established in 1957, and to direct the restoration of Prinsengracht 263, which opened as Anne Frank House in 1960.
On January 24, 1963, Otto and Fritzi set up the Anne Frank Fonds, a charitable foundation with offices in Basel, where they continued to reside. The copyright to Anne’s diary and all royalties from the book, the play, the film, and any radio and television presentations would devolve to the Anne Frank Fonds. To his relatives he left bequests and portions of the royalties, up to a certain amount, during their lifetimes. The rest went to the Fonds. However, wanting to ensure that the diaries would never be sold—who knew what would become of the Anne Frank Foundation in fifty years?—Otto willed the physical diaries to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), knowing that the Dutch government would never sell them and they would be safe.1
Otto and Fritzi lived on the outskirts of Basel but often spent the summer months in Beckenried, on Lake Lucerne. Fritzi spoke about her years with Otto as “among the happiest of my whole life. . . . He had an innate sense of what it meant to be family.”2 Otto was close to Fritzi’s daughter, Eva, and Eva’s husband and three children. He and Fritzi spent three months of every year living with them in London.
There were many trips: to the United States and to Germany for events related to the diary. And many awards. On May 12, 1979, Otto celebrated his ninetieth birthday in London, and then, on June 12, he traveled to Amsterdam for the Anne Frank Fiftieth Birthday Tribute in the Westerkerk on Prinsengracht, after which he escorted the queen to the Anne Frank House for a private tour.
But age was catching up with him, and in his last year he suffered from lung cancer, though he would insist he was not sick, just tired. One of the last people to visit him before his death was Joseph Spronz, a friend and fellow survivor whom Otto had met in Auschwitz. Spronz’s wife described the visit:
When we arrived, Otto was in bed, but he heard us and got up, holding out his arms. He looked into my husband’s eyes, and they embraced. Otto murmured against my husband’s shoulder, “My dear friend Joseph.” He was so weak. The hospital staff arrived to collect him a few minutes later. We followed, and my husband was allowed into Otto’s room. They spoke of Auschwitz.3
Otto died that night.
Among the helpers, Miep Gies was always the closest to Otto. He lived with her and her husband for seven years after his return from the east. He always said he associated Amsterdam with friendship unto death, and by that he meant Miep Gies. Miep said that people often asked her what it was like to outlive almost everyone whose history she’d shared. She would respond that it was “strange.” “Why me?” she would ask. Why was she spared the concentration camp when Kugler and Kleiman were caught hiding Jews and it was clear that she’d been doing so, too?
After Otto moved to Basel, she and Jan visited him every year. When the film of her book Anne Frank Remembered was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1996, Miep went with the director, Jon Blair, to Hollywood. She became in effect the spokesperson for Anne’s diary after Otto’s death, saying:
The message to take from Anne’s story is to stop prejudice and discrimination right at its beginning. Prejudice starts when we speak about THE Jews, THE Arabs, THE Asians, THE Mexicans, THE Blacks, THE Whites. This leads to the feeling that all members of each such group think and act the same.4
Miep died in 2010 at the age of one hundred.
After the publication of Anne’s diary in 1947, Johannes Kleiman regularly took journalists and visitors on guided tours of the secret Annex. Even after Otto moved to Switzerland, Kleiman held power of attorney for him and functioned almost as Otto’s private secretary, particularly in his dealings with publishers of Anne’s diary. He was deeply involved in the restoration of the Anne Frank House and in 1957 became a member of the board of the Anne Frank Foundation, although he didn’t live to see the opening of the museum. He died of a stroke in his office on January 30, 1959. He was sixty-three years old.
Victor Kugler’s wife, who had been ill for a long time, died in 1952. Three years later, he married again and moved to Toronto, where his second wife’s family lived. He died in Toronto in 1989 at the age of eighty-one. The book about him with the unfortunate title The Man Who Hid Anne Frank (it is clear that he was not the only helper) was published in 2008 after both his and Otto’s deaths.
Bep Voskuijl married in 1946 and had four children. She never lost contact with Otto, visiting him every week when he was still in Amsterdam and three times a year after he moved to Switzerland. She was always reticent about the war years and her role as a helper and gave few interviews. She met Queen Juliana at the Dutch premiere of the film The Diary of Anne Frank by George Stevens, but in a letter to Otto, she admitted that she found it all uncomfortable. She wanted to support what she called “the symbol of the idealized Anne,” but it always brought back the pain of what she’d witnessed. “This great pain never leaves my heart,” she said.5
Everyone who knew Bep remarked that the “once cheerful young woman” always struggled to maintain her balance, unable to accept the deaths of the Annex residents.6 She died in Amsterdam of an aortic rupture in 1983 at the age of sixty-three.
At Otto’s request, in 1972 the four helpers were awarded the Yad Vashem honorary title of Righteous Under the Nations, including Johannes Kleiman, who was acknowledged posthumously.
Otto Frank was determined to be a survivor and not a victim. To be a victim was to give the victory to the Nazis. But tellingly, he never watched a single performance of the play or film based on Anne’s diary. According to his stepdaughter, Eva, “He couldn’t bear the thought that actresses would be saying the words he once heard Anne and Margot speak, pretending to be the children that he would never see again.”7
He despised generalizations. Proud of his German heritage, he did not accept the idea of collective guilt. He spent extra time replying to letters from German schoolchildren, wanting them to learn what had happened during the war. As Otto Frank’s biographer recorded, in 1952, 88 percent of Germans “said they felt no personal responsibility for the mass exterminations.”8 It would only be the next generation who would confront what actually happened in Germany that gave license to the murderousness of Hitler and the Nazis.
Otto knew that his daughter was a symbol for the millions—both Jews and non-Jews—who had been murdered. Her diary and the secret Annex stood in his mind as both a warning from the past and a source of hope.9 He wanted people to remember so it wouldn’t happen again. He wanted them to know that fascism builds slowly and then one day it is an iron wall that looms and cannot be circumvented. He wanted them to know what can be lost and how fast it can happen.