Anne Frank's father's letters discovered in New York

Jan 26, 2007, 15:00 GMT

New York - A cache of letters written by Anne Frank's father, recently discovered in New York, details Otto Frank's desperate struggle to save his family from the Nazis during World War II, reports said Friday.

The 80 documents discovered at the New York YIVO Institute for Jewish Research are to be declassified and released at a press conference on February 14, a Time magazine report said.

The previously unknown documents are Otto Frank's letters from April to December 1941, written at the time when Germany declared war on the United States, Time said.

The letters included correspondence with US relatives. The Franks' two years of hiding, which inspired Anne Frank's diary, began in July 1942 in an attic above Otto Frank's office in Amsterdam.

Otto Frank made valiant efforts to secure the safety of his daughters Margot and Anne, his wife Edith and mother-in-law Rosa Hollander.

According to Time, the letters evoke 'page by page' how the family tried to escape from the Netherlands.

Since the US consulate was closed in the Nazi-occupied country, Otto Frank explored possible escape routes through Spain into neutral Portugal. He also tried to get visas for his family to travel to Paris and tried to arrange for his family to flee to the US and Cuba.

According to the Time report, the letters originally belonged to the New York-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS), which bequeathed their archive material to the YIVO-Institute.

An archivist at the YIVO institute found the letters a year and a half ago. However, the archive kept the discovery secret in order to investigate the complicated copyright questions they raised.

Otto Frank was the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust. After the war, he published his daughter's diary. He died in Switzerland in 1980.

In 1945, Anne Frank, then 15, and her sister Margot who was 18 died of typhoid in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.