by Pam Uher

Created on: January 16, 2008

Otto Frank, Holocaust survivor, will probably be known many years after other names fade from our memory and from the words of historians. He was the father of Anne Frank, who was perhaps the most famous child of World War II and the most well known child Holocaust victim.
It is due to him that today we have Anne's diary to read and help explain that terrible time in world history from the "up close" human perspective.

His life story was brought to the forefront of the world again last year (February 14,2007), by the NPR broadcast called "All Things Considered", by Margot Adler, when his unknown letters were found. And the world was witness to the story of the Frank family, through another family member. A father who tried to escape Hitler's march to conquer Europe (and the world), while horrifically watching the Nazi agenda decimate all he loved and held precious.

Otto Frank (May 12,1889 - August 19, 1980) was the father of Anne and Margot Frank. He was born into a wealthy banking family in Frankfurt, Germany. When World War I broke out he felt it his duty to serve Germany and fought on the Western Front, eventually becoming a lieutenant in the Imperial German Army.

After World War I, he returned to Frankfurt and married Edith Hollander (May 12, 1925).
Margot was born February 16, 1926 and Anne was born June 12, 1929.

When the Nazi wave of anti-Jewish decrees and attacks against the Jews began,he chose to move his family to what was thought at the time to be a safer Western European nation. The family moved from Aachen (1933)and then to Amsterdam. The book "The Hidden Life of Otto Frank", by Carol Ann Lee, details and documents how Otto Frank struggled to emigrate to the U.S. and then Cuba. It never happened. When the Nazi's came for him and his family, he tucked his family (1942) into the the attic of the Opekta household, hoping to avoid capture and deportment to concentration camps.

For 2 years he and his family stayed hidden from the world and the Nazi's, along with Hermann van Pels and his wife and son and Fritz Pfeffer. It was during that time his daughter Anne would write, the now famous "Anne Frank Diary".

Then in 1944 he was betrayed by an anonymous informant (who is identified in the Carol Ann Lee book) and the SS arrested them all. They were imprisoned in Amsterdam first and then the Jewish detainees (the Franks) were sent to the Dutch transit facility of Westerbrook. There they were processed and sent on to the 'death pit' concentration camp called

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