Letters reveal desperate plight of Anne Frank's family

[struggle4progress]

By Patricia Cohen
Published: February 14, 2007

NEW YORK: After lying undisturbed in a New Jersey warehouse for nearly 30 years, documents revealing the desperate efforts of Anne Frank's family to escape to the United States and Cuba from Nazi-occupied Holland in 1941 have been discovered thanks to a clerical error.

The previously unknown story told in the 81 pages of government papers and personal correspondence that were made public Wednesday begins on April 30, 1941, days after a Gestapo courier tried to blackmail the Franks, and ends a few months before July of 1942, when they and another family went into hiding for two years, as vividly chronicled by Anne in her famous diary.

"I am forced to look out for emigration and as far as I can see U.S.A. is the only country we could go to," Anne's father, Otto, wrote to his college friend, Nathan Straus Jr., the head of the federal Housing Authority, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt's and the son of a Macy's co-owner, asking him to put up a $5,000 bond. "It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for. Our own fate is of less importance," Otto Frank wrote.

Page by page, the papers illustrate the tortuous process for gaining entry to the United States in those days. Even with powerful connections and money, European Jews could not overcome the State Department's restrictions against refugees, said two Holocaust scholars who examined the documents ...

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/15/news/frank.php

[sce56]

1. I recently bought two books for the niños through the Scholastic book program about Ann

Yes it did happen here Manzanar CA

[pnorman]

3. "State Department's restrictions against refugees,"

It went well beyond that. The State Department had committed anti-Semites near the top, and at the decision-making level. Ass's Sec. of State Breckinridge Long is just one who come to mind: Here's one Google hit:
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After Pearl Harbor, Edsel Ford moved to protect the company's interest in Occupied France, even though this would mean collaboration with the Nazi government |Edsel and Dollfus decided to consolidate their operation in conjunction with Carl Krauch, Heinrich Albert, and Gerhardt Westrick in Gemmany. The problem they had was how to keep in touch, since their two countries were at war. In order to overcome this difficulty, Edsel traveled to Washington at the beginning of 1942 and entered into an arrangement with Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, who simultaneously was blocking financial aid to German-Jewish refugees by citing the Trading with the Enemy Act. Long agreed that it should be possible for letters to travel to and from Occupied France via Lisbon and Vichy. Since it would be too dangerous to risk the letters falling into the hands of the press or foreign agents, they would have to be carried by a Portuguese courier named George Lesto who, with clearance from the Nazi government, was permitted to travel in and out of Paris.
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http://libcom.org/library/allied-multinationals-supply-nazi-germany-world-war-2

A deeper web-search would make the case more established.

pnorman
On edit: I accidentlly linked to the wrong posting. It should have been the original one,

[aquart]

2. Yeah, my mom's reverence for FDR is pretty limited.

[Cassandra]

4. The State Department's restrictions...

were courtesy of the Coolidge era, when immigration was very frowned upon, especially by those Eastern European types. FDR was still stuck with the laws left over from that time. Just spreading the blame around a bit.