The next year, on November 10, at the age of sixty-four, Otto married again. His new wife was the woman he’d met at the train stop in Czernowitz in the Ukraine on the journey from Auschwitz eight years earlier.
Elfriede “Fritzi” Geiringer had lived in the same neighborhood in Amsterdam as Otto, but they hadn’t known each other. In July 1942, both the Geiringer and the Frank families went into hiding. Fritzi and her daughter, Eva, found refuge in Amsterdam, while her husband and son disappeared into the countryside. Both families were betrayed.
After the liberation Otto visited Fritzi and Eva in their old apartment at Merwedeplein 46. On July 18, 1945, he learned that both his daughters had perished. On August 8, the Red Cross informed Fritzi that her husband, Erich, and her son, Heinz, had been killed.6
Between 1947 and 1949, Otto helped Fritzi through the arduous trials of the betrayers of her husband and son. The legal proceedings were devastating for her to attend. Otto was actively seeking the identity of his own family’s betrayer, and witnessing the pain and eventual frustration Fritzi went through at the trials, which essentially exonerated the culprits, must have been equally devastating for him.
The relationship between Otto Frank and Fritzi Geiringer provided consolation of an unimaginably tragic dimension, a profound comfort based on their mutual loss. Otto once said that because they both survived concentration camps and both lost spouses and children, they could understand each other. A relationship with someone who didn’t share such suffering would have been impossible.7
Fritzi’s daughter, Eva, gave a moving portrait of the man who became her stepfather:
Otto had been living in Merwedeplein with my mother for some time, but they were both haunted by all their memories. . . . Although he was completely driven to ensure Anne’s diary was published, and gained the recognition it deserved, the war and loss of his family had placed a terrible strain on Otto’s emotional and mental well-being.8
The truth was that Otto needed to be near his existing family. He and Fritzi began the next phase of their lives in Switzerland. In Basel, the couple settled into the home of Otto’s sister, Leni, her husband, Erich Elias, and their two sons. They stayed for almost seven years before moving into their own modest apartment in the Basel suburb of Birsfelden. Nothing, except perhaps Anne’s legacy, was now more important to Otto than his connection with his family. Over the years he became very close to Eva, her husband, and their three daughters in London; he and Fritzi visited them as often as they could. And he was close to his mother, who also lived in Basel.
On March 21, 1953, he and Fritzi were in London when his brother Robert phoned to say that their mother had died the previous night of a stroke. Two months later, Robert suffered a heart attack and died on May 23. At the same time, Otto was dealing with the owner of Prinsengracht 263, who wanted to sell the property. At a deep psychological level, losing the building felt as though his history was being effaced. He’d lost his mother, his brother, his past. He wanted to turn the building into something meaningful, a symbolic reminder of what must never happen again.
Working on the book and play of Anne’s diary gave him purpose, but at the same time, it must have been very painful for him to relive those years in hiding. He told friends he was feeling fragile and had to be careful of his nerves.9 In October 1954, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to hospital, though he soon recovered.10 He was lucky to have Fritzi’s devotion.
Even though it was almost fifteen years since the war had ended, anti-Semitic attacks continued. A German man wrote Otto in 1959, “I’m shocked that you as a father have published such a thing. But that is typical of the Jew. You’d still seek to fill your pockets with the stinking corpse of your daughter. A blessing to humanity that such creatures were extinguished by Hitler.”11 It took courage for Otto to expose himself to that kind of vile filth. In 1959, he and his publishers initiated the first of several lawsuits against those who challenged the authenticity of his daughter’s diary. His friend Father John Neiman said, “Stories about the diary being a fake cut [Otto] deeply, and though it cost him a lot personally and financially to fight these people, he did it on behalf of all victims of Nazism.”12 The slanders against the diary never abated in Otto’s lifetime. Perhaps it was some consolation that shortly before he died in 1980, the Supreme Court of West Germany ruled that insulting Jews by denying the Holocaust was a criminal offense.13
Part II
Cold Case Investigation
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