Anne Frank's father's letters discovered in New York

Anne Frank's father's letters discovered in New York dpa German Press AgencyPublished: Friday January 26, 2007

New York- A cache of letters written by Anne Frank'sfather, recently discovered in New York, details Otto Frank'sdesperate struggle to save his family from the Nazis during World WarII, reports said Friday.The 80 documents discovered at the New York YIVO Institute forJewish Research are to be declassified and released at a pressconference on February 14, a Time magazine report said.The previously unknown documents are Otto Frank's letters fromApril to December 1941, written at the time when Germany declared waron the United States, Time said.The letters included correspondence with US relatives. The Franks'two years of hiding, which inspired Anne Frank's diary, began in July1942 in an attic above Otto Frank's office in Amsterdam.Otto Frank made valiant efforts to secure the safety of hisdaughters Margot and Anne, his wife Edith and mother-in-law RosaHollander.According to Time, the letters evoke "page by page" how the familytried to escape from the Netherlands.Since the US consulate was closed in the Nazi-occupied country,Otto Frank explored possible escape routes through Spain into neutralPortugal. He also tried to get visas for his family to travel toParis and tried to arrange for his family to flee to the US and Cuba.According to the Time report, the letters originally belonged tothe New York-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS), whichbequeathed their archive material to the YIVO-Institute.An archivist at the YIVO institute found the letters a year and ahalf ago. However, the archive kept the discovery secret in order toinvestigate the complicated copyright questions they raised.Otto Frank was the only member of the family to survive theHolocaust. After the war, he published his daughter's diary. He diedin Switzerland in 1980.In 1945, Anne Frank, then 15, and her sister Margot who was 18died of typhoid in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.