Otto Frank is the father of the famous Anne Frank of the heartbreaking diary, and the only one of the four Franks who survived the Holocaust. German-born, Otto Frank had served in the German army in World War I; he and his wife were raising their two young daughters in Germany. In the mid-thirties, as Nazism’s persecution of Jews was on the rise, Otto decided to take his little family to Amsterdam; there he opened a small business with the ownership in the name of non-Jewish associates. He also attempted on more than one occasion to obtain visas so he and his family could emigrate out of the country, preferably to the United States. We all know how that turned out. After two years in hiding with his family and assorted others to whom they extended their generosity, the Franks and the others in hiding were betrayed, taken prisoner and ultimately sent to Auschwitz. After the war, Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam and collected the diary from the ransacked hiding place. He spent the rest of his life overseeing its publication (with some controversial bits of editing), seeing to the production of stage plays and movies, and establishing the Anne Frank Foundation. He married a fellow Holocaust survivor, had more children and lived to the ripe old age of 90, but surely a large part of Otto Frank had already died in 1945.
