Before the Secret Annex

Last week we opened our production of "The Diary of Anne Frank" by Wendy Kesselman. This powerful adaptation tells the story of eight Jews hiding during the Holocaust. Today assistant director Elizabeth Creeley took some time to let us know who these people were and what happened before they walked onto our stage.

The Frank family in 1941.

The story of the Secret Annex begins with Anne’s father, Otto Frank. It was he, along with his staff and rescuers—Meip Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleinman and Victor Gustav Kugler—who first thought of hiding from the Nazis and their Dutch allies within the city itself, at the offices and warehouse of his business, Opekta, a manufacturing firm located at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.

Otto Frank was born May 12, 1889, in Frankfurt to a prosperous Jewish family, which had been involved in banking and commerce since the mid-nineteenth century and had lived in Frankfurt for generations. Otto was brought up well, amidst turn-of-the-century German culture. He was schooled at private institutions and came of age, secure in the knowledge that his class and his culture—secular and thoroughly assimilated—were based in inheritable, stable institutions. He graduated from the Lessing-Gymnasium in Frankfurt, and enrolled in the University of Heidelberg. After cutting short his studies, he traveled in New York to work in the office of Macy’s Department Store for a time. After a broken engagement and the death of his father, he returned to Germany once in 1909 and then for good in 1911, just three years before Germany invaded Belgium and the First World War began.

He was drafted into the Kaiser’s army and rose to the rank of Lieutenant, a fact which later gave pause to the arresting officer, SS-Oberscharführer Karl Joseph Silberbauer, during the arrest of the occupants of the Secret Annex. Silberbauer later claimed to Austrian authorities that he had treated the prisoners “courteously” during the arrest, because of Otto Frank’s status as a lieutenant in the First World War.

Otto Frank met Edith Holländer when she was twenty-five and he was thirty-six. Shy and a devoutly observant Jew, Edith was born in Aachen, a German city close to the Dutch border. They married in Aachen in 1925. Nine months later, in February 1926, Edith gave birth to Margot Betti in Frankfurt am Main. Three years later, on June 12, 1926, Annaliese Marie or “Anne” was born.

After a failed banking venture, and with one eye on the rising anti-semitism in Germany, Otto Frank moved his family to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in the summer of 1933, after staying for a short time with Edith’s mother In Aachen. Two years later, the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship, were introduced. Otto and his family became non-citizens, stripped of their national identity, belonging to no nation, and no state.

Otto Frank sits in the center surrounded by his Opekta co-workers. Miep is seated to the left and Kugler ("Kraler") stands to the right.

The Frank family thus joined an estimated 355,278 Jews who left Germany and Austria, panicked by the hatred of the Nazi government and desperate to escape the certain persecution and death that awaited them. Otto began a new life as the owner and director of Opekta, a manufacturer of pectin to be used in jam making. Once in Amsterdam, Otto met and hired three people, all destined to play a crucial role on the hiding of the Frank family: Meip Gies, an Austrian-born woman sent to live in Amsterdam at a young age due to illness and Victor Kugler (given the pseudonym “Mr. Kraler” by Anne in her diary). These two, with the active assistance of several others, including Miep’s husband Jan and Opekta staff members Bep Voskuijl and Johannes Kleiman, formed a lifeline that connected of the inhabitants of the Secret Annex to the outside world.

Otto, in an effort to diversify Opekta’s commercial base, formed a business partnership with Hermann van Pels (“Mr. van Daan”). Hermann van Pels was born in Gehrde, Germany, in 1890 to a family of butchers and sausage makers. Hermann and Auguste van Pels (“Mrs. van Daan”), née Röttgen, were married in Osnabruck and had one son, Peter, who was born in 1926. Nazi prohibitions against Jews owning businesses meant that Herman and his sister, Ida, were forced to sell the van Pels’ meat seasoning business. Shortly thereafter, the van Pels fled from the rapidly deteriorating situation in Germany, arriving in Amsterdam during June 1937. The van Pels family lived in the same neighborhood as the Franks. In 1938, Otto Frank hired Hermann van Pels as a herbal specialist and formed a new company to prepare and distribute spices, Pectacon.

The last Jewish refugee to enter the story of the Secret Annex was a man named Fritz Pfeffer (“Mr. Dussel”), a dentist. A tall, handsome, athletic man, Pfeffer was on the periphery of the Franks’ social circle, having been known by Miep Gies, whose dentist shared a surgery with Pfeffer. Fritz Pfeffer was born in Giessen, Germany, and after a first marriage ended in divorce, fled to Amsterdam, registered as a Jewish refugee, and met and fell in love with a Christian woman, Charlotte Kaletta. They tried to marry but could not, due Nazi-era “Blood Protection Laws,” segregationist laws which were a part of the Nuremberg Laws. These laws prohibited sexual relations between Jews and Christians, as well as marriage.

Otto, Edith, Margot, and Anne Frank went into hiding on July 6, 1942, and were joined on July 13 by Hermann, Auguste, and Peter van Pels. Fritz Pfeffer joined them in November, forming a group of self-incarcerated Jews, hiding in the tiny upstairs attic of the Opekta offices and warehouse. The eight lived together in the cramped annex (Achterhuis or “back house”) for two-and-a-half years, from July 1942 to August 4, 1944.

Photo Credits and Further Reading:

“The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition.” Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. Doubleday, New York, 1989.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, “36 Questions About the Holocaust” http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=394663.

Anne Frank.org, "Overview" www.annefrank.org.

The Anne Frank Guide, "Date" http://www.annefrankguide.net/en-GB/bronnenbank.asp?aid=10679.

Arjunpuri's Blog "A tribute to Anne Frank whose innocence touched many lives" http://arjunpuri.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/a-tribute-to-anne-frank-whose-innocence-touched-many-lives/.

USA Today "Rescuer of Anne Frank's Diary Marks 100th Birthday" http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-02-12-annefrank-helper_N.htm.