Observer Review: The Hidden Life Of Otto Frank By Carol Ann Lee Essay, Research Paper

Answers from the atticThe Hidden Life of Otto FrankCarol Ann LeeViking? 17.99, pp384Until the start of the Second World War, Otto Frank & # 8217 ; s life was as soothing and wrinkle-free as newly laundered linen. Born into an upper-middle-class German household & # 8211 ; his were the sort of people who called on their neighbors merely at the right hr of the afternoon & # 8211 ; he worried about the same things as any immature adult male: who to get married, what to make for a life, how to do his manner in the universe and still hold a small fun.Even when he was called up for military service and found himself at the Western Front, he managed to cleaving to his vernal optimism: & # 8216 ; I miss nil here and the danger I am in is merely in your imaginativeness, & # 8217 ; he wrote to his sister in 1916. & # 8216 ; It & # 8217 ; s truly non that bad. & # 8217 ; But that optimism began to steal, easy, inexorably, from his appreciation on the sunstruck forenoon of 4 August 1944, when the Amsterdam extension where he and his household had been concealing for two old ages was raided by the Gestapo and three members of the Dutch National Socialist Party.What happened in the six short months between the Gestapo & # 8217 ; s reaching at the other side of a movable bookcase and the twenty-four hours the Russians liberated Auschwitz, where Otto was held captive, changed everything everlastingly. Like all subsisters, the cantonments tore his psyche in two. There was life before the war, a watery, untouchable dream, and there was life after: lonely, intolerable, pointless.This life tells the narrative of how Otto stitched the two halves of his life together, something he achieved with the aid of his youngest girl & # 8217 ; s bequest: her journal. It was Otto who judiciously edited ( or censored, depending on your point of position ) the words that tumbled out of Anne during the period when she and her parents, her sister Margot, and four friends lived their yearss every bit softly as & # 8216 ; babe mice & # 8217 ; in five little suites ; Otto who sought a publishing house for them at a clip when most people wished to bury all about the Holocaust ; Otto who made sure that phase and movie versions of the diary were true to her & # 8217 ; spirit & # 8217 ; . What he got in return was a small peace of mind.Otto Frank served his state with differentiation during the First World War ( an officer, his love for the homeland made Germany & # 8217 ; s subsequently behaviour all the harder for him to bear ) . Afterwards, a broken battle already behind him, he married Edith Hollander in a Frankfurt temple. Edith was more spiritual than her new hubby, a disadvantage in his eyes, but her dowery was significant. It was, he subsequently admitted, & # 8216 ; a concern agreement & # 8217 ; , though non even his comfortable married woman could assist when, in the early Thirties, the household banking concern plunged one time once more into the ruddy and the twosome, together with their two girls, were forced to travel back in with Otto & # 8217 ; s mother.Their money concerns were as nil compared to their concerns about the political state of affairs. In January 1933, they heard on the radio that Hitler had been made Chancellor of the Exchequer. As the cheers rose in the background, Otto glanced at Edith and saw her sitting & # 8216 ; as if turned to lapidate & # 8217 ; . At first, he was loath to go forth Germany but, when a edict was passed implementing the segregation of Judaic and non-Jewish kids in schools, he decided he had no choice.His brother-in-law suggested that he open an Amsterdam subdivision of a company merchandising pectin, which was used in the industry of jam ; so, that August, he left the state where his household had lived for centuries. The Netherlands proved no safer. After Germany invaded, Edith wanted to emigrate to America but Otto, of all time matter-of-fact, made his concern expression sufficiently & # 8216 ; Aryan & # 8217 ; ( he transferred commanding portions to gentiles ) and hoped for the best. He even sold his wares to the Wehrmacht.As fortunes worsened, nevertheless, he began to believe about taking his household into concealment. Plans were made to house the household in an extension behind the offices of his company at 263 Prinsengracht and, on the quiet, nutrient, linen and furniture were moved into the edifice. When, on 5 July 1942, 16-year-old Margot Frank was ordered to describe to the SS for exile to a German labor cantonment, the household was ready: they merely disappeared

.The following two years are now the stuff of legend, as the queues of tourists snaking out of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam testify.Some critics have accused the diary of sentimentalising the Holocaust, which is true, and though it is hardly her fault, the book ends with Anne’s fate delicately unspoken. Here, though, we go where those who interviewed Otto after the war so often feared to tread. We see him transported in a cattle car from Westerbork to Auschwitz. We watch him turn his head for a last look at his wife and children. We listen as he fights his desperate hunger by talking, not about food, but about Beethoven.Otto survived only because he was too sick to join the brutal German evacuation as the Russians approached. The account of his long journey from Poland back to the Netherlands is the most fascinating part of this book. Lee has found a diary he kept after his liberation and, though he used it only to record brief details of what he did and saw, it makes poignant reading.He was freed in January 1945. On 12 June, the day that would have been his youngest daughter’s sixteenth birthday, he wrote just one word in it: ‘Anne’. On 18 July, he checked the Red Cross lists and saw a cross by her name. Only then did he accept that she was not coming home.When he could finally bear to read Anne’s diary, which had been rescued by a friend, he found it ‘indescribably exciting’, and he set about finding a publisher. Given that the book has since sold 20 million copies in 58 languages, the resistance he met is almost comic. At Doubleday, the marketing team was told to ‘play down the grim aspects of the story’, and the feeling was that the book’s ’sales potential was small’.Otto, however, was cock-a-hoop to have a deal at all. For him, a secular but emotional man, Anne’s Jewishness was less important than her universal appeal as a symbol of freedom and tolerance. He wanted her ‘message’ to reach as many people as possible; if that meant watering down her faith, or flinching from the horrors of the camps, so be it.The final half of this biography, then, is not so much about Otto as it is about the book that gave his life fresh meaning. Lee takes you through the whole shebang, from his dealings with the saccharine, two-faced Frances and Albert Hackett, writers of the stage and screen adaptations of the diary (their Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway smash hit was so anodyne many people thought its characters fictional), to his endless legal row with the unhinged Meyer Levin, a Jewish writer they beat to the job.Meanwhile, gentle Otto is lost along the way, his second, passionate marriage to another Holocaust survivor, Fritzi Markovitz, and, in particular, his nervous breakdown only a little more than nodded to in passing. As in life, he fades into the background as soon as his ghostly daughter takes centre stage.But Lee does have a new theory about who betrayed the family to the authorities – and it is a good one, even if, at times, her dogged pursuit of it becomes a narrative red herring. Her suspect is Tonny Ahlers, a thug and anti-Semite whom she also believes blackmailed Otto until his death in 1980. Ahlers knew that at the start of the war Otto had continued to do business with the Wehrmacht (the pectin his firm produced was essential for the preservation of the German army’s rations), a fact he would undoubtedly have wanted to remain secret. Perhaps this was the reason why Otto, to the immense frustration of Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal, showed so little interest in tracking down those responsible for the murder of his family.When Audrey Hepburn met Otto in 1957, after she was asked to audition for the lead role in the Hollywood take on the diary, he struck her as somebody ‘who’d been purged by fire… he’d been there and back’. Carol Ann Lee recreates this tortuous journey meticulously, with a kind of orderly, Prussian care that her subject would have adored. And yet, when I finished reading her book, Otto was as opaque as ever, his motives often troubling.The problem is, I suppose, that it is only thanks to his quicksilver daughter that we have heard of him at all. He was a father first, and a father last, and not even the most determined biographer can change that.