How did Otto Frank survive?

Anne was spared because of her age and I'm guessing her sister too somehow even though she was older and then they later died from other things, and her mum was spared too but died from starvation but her father survived.

Is it a case of Margot (Anne's sister), her mum and father not having been spared but that they just hadn't been sent to the gas chambers yet?

Nothing like that should have ever been allowed to happen. I don't understand how it did in the first place, the rest of the world should have intervened. But Im guessing it was during the war and that all the other countries were busy with that (I know nothing about history as you can see). And it shouldn't be allowed to happen again.

It did though with Rwanda and everything.

Those poor people, who spoke out for their lives? Because of one man...millions of people died. Just for being different in ways they couldn't help and didn't choose to be. It's real sad.

The fundamental human right you have as a human is to live, who has the right to take that away from you? It's not even like...taking away some money from you or some possessions, it's taking away you, you just get...erased and you never get it back.

R.I.P all the poor souls that were treated so unjustly and for all the people that continue to be because there's no-one to speak out for them or try to make things better for them.

Reply 1

Somebody

Blue Rose

Is it a case of Margot (Anne's sister), her mum and father not having been spared but that they just hadn't been sent to the gas chambers yet?

I think it's most likely this...

Reply 2

Blue Rose

Somebody

I think it's most likely this...

Okay, thanks.

It's good that one person did survive from the family though I guess *shrugs* Though going through all that, losing the rest of his family, wouldn't have been good for him.

Reply 3

Jon of the North

Blue Rose

Okay, thanks.

It's good that one person did survive from the family though I guess *shrugs* Though going through all that, losing the rest of his family, wouldn't have been good for him.

He remarried I believe.

If he hadn't of survived, Anne's story potentially would not have survived or have been published and therefore the Holocasut would perhaps have not had the same resonance? Maybe.

Reply 4

Blue Rose

Jon of the North

For me it would, as long as I know it happened, it's not so much of the personal case of Anne Frank, but for every single person that it happened to and who lost family members.

Imagine it happening to you or people you know right now, losing friends and family just because of what they look like, and attribute you don't choose and which it isn't a crime to have, or because of sexuality or religion. A person is free to believe in what they like as long as it they don't harm other people and it wasn't the jews envoking any violence on anyone, they were just picked on unfairly.

He remarried, that's interesting. I don't think that says anything though. I don't think a past marriage or relationship can really affect a subsequent one (unless it was a string of similar ones). If all that happened to you then someone lovely came along that you had, that wasn't taken away from you, you'd cease the chance, not because you've stopped loving/didn't love your partner but just because you want to try and get on with the rest of your life and enjoy what you have left/escape the misery you have. Having another partner might help you to try to get over all the misery (not suggesting that people should jump from relationship to relationship when something has happened to the last one :tongue:

A little unhealthy).

Reply 5

CatieG

But with all respects, Blue Rose, it’s only because of the diary, and the glimpse of her subjective experience we are touched so powerfully by the fact of what happened to her in the holocaust. We can hear about young children found sitting next to their dead (for days) mothers’ bodies, girls and women raped, driven from their homes, forced to live in squalid refugee camps for perhaps years, knowing they could be attacked again at any minute. All this (and much more) is, as I’m sure you like the rest of the world knows, going on right now. But unless a camera or microphone is thrust in their faces, or a film like the ‘Killing fields’ makes us weep, or we find a diary like Anne’s, we don’t stay angry enough to make our governments do anything about it, in the way you say we should have done about the holocaust. We can of course get as angry as we like about that and the fact no-one did stop it – it’s all hindsight now, and not our responsibility. The politics of why it was allowed to happen have faded away, in a way the present politics of the middle east, Africa, et al, haven’t.

The fact is just as people now are too preoccupied with their own problems (credit crunch, economic downturn, fear of immigration, etc) to insist their governments engage with desperate suffering in other societies as a priority, the people of Europe and the rest of the world did not see the brutality of fascist Germany or its victims as a priority until it threatened them. They too thought they had their own problems. The Franks (and possibly millions of others) could have gone to Britain or the US – they wanted to – but by the time they applied neither country would accept Jewish refugees. Even Holland closed its doors shortly after the Franks fled there. They were all so frightened of being culturally ‘swamped’ by Jews they left them to the mercies of the Nazis. Appalling – just as appalling as the way our xenophobic press has harried our governments into tightening up asylum regulations for the same reasons.

As for Otto Frank….well, a very fascinating man.

At root, the reason he had even a slim chance at surviving was the annex. It bought them all time, even though they were discovered eventually and all the others died. But the fact he wasn’t sent to the camps earlier in the war saved his life, as it did Primo Levi, who makes this point himself. The fittest, strongest man in the world couldn’t have endured the starvation, cold, disease, and selections of the death camps for long. Another few weeks in hiding and nearer the end of the war, and some of the others might have made it too. Heartbreaking.

More personally, you might be interested to know some new information about him and the family. For instance, you touch on whether his remarriage was some kind of ‘disloyalty’ to his love for Anne and Margot’s mother. As Anne tells (it seems he discussed this with her, though later altered her words a little when he transcribed the diary entry on the matter), throughout his first marriage his heart remained true to the memory of a woman who jilted him years before. Rather than a love match, the marriage to Edith was an arranged marriage of convenience as far as he was concerned, and this (unsurprisingly) rather poisoned it from her perspective. The family was in fact rather dysfunctional by all accounts. Even poor Margot he was pretty distant with – Anne was very much his favourite, in a way that seems to have verged on the emotionally inappropriate. His second marriage was much more passionate affair than the first, by all accounts.

It has also emerged that the person who almost certainly betrayed them was a business colleague of Otto’s. A nasty piece of work with Nazi sympathies. Frank must have known this. Yet after the war this man blackmailed Otto for over thirty years, threatening to disclose that Otto’s company had continued selling their goods to the German army they were hiding from. Of course Otto didn’t want this made public – people would have misunderstood his motives (to deflect German suspicion from the company, and thus protect his family who were hiding on its premises), and accused him of profiteering and collaborating with the enemy. This mattered very much when he became in effect the high priest and guardian of the Anne Frank cult and story. She and her family had to be innocent and above reproach in a cynical world. So for decades the poor man in effect supported and protected one of the individuals most directly responsible for the death of all those he held dear.

Ultimately the cracks don’t matter – no-one should have to endure what the Frank family and others went through, and taking the family off a pedestal shouldn’t diminish them or their experience. But Otto knew we don’t like our victims and martyrs tarnished, so he played the game to protect Anne as the symbol she had become, because he felt he owed that to his daughter and her immortality, and the good she could achieve through it.

How did Otto Frank survive?

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