ANNE FRANK'S FATHER SOUGHT VISAS
Dozens of letters found in an American archive reveal the desperate efforts of Anne Frank's father Otto to escape from the Nazis with his family. The letters - including some from his American relatives and friends - were written before the family went into hiding in Amsterdam in 1942. The 78 documents are to be released on 14 February by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Anne Frank's diary, found after the war, has moved millions of readers. He survived the Auschwitz death camp, but Anne died just before her 16th birthday in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. The family went into hiding in a cramped attic in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation in July 1942 but a betrayal led to their arrest in 1944. The letters were found in New York a year ago by a YIVO researcher, Estelle Guzik. They reveal how in 1941 Otto Frank had tried to obtain visas for his family to travel to the US or Cuba. YIVO's executive director Carl Rheins said t...