Letters from Anne Frank’s father donated, digitized
YARMOUTH, Mass. — Ryan Cooper was a 20-something Californian unsure of his place in the world when he struck up a pen pal correspondence in the 1970s with Otto Frank, the father of the young Holocaust victim Anne Frank.
Through dozens of letters and several face-to-face meetings, the two forged a friendship that lasted until Frank died in 1980 at the age of 91.
Now 73 years old, Cooper, an antiques dealer and artist in Massachusetts, has donated a trove of letters and mementos he received from Frank to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington ahead of the 90th anniversary Wednesday of Anne Frank’s birth.
He wants the letters to be shared so that people can have a deeper understanding of the man who introduced the world to Anne Frank, whose famous World War II diary is considered one of the most important works of the 20th century.
“He was a lot like Anne in that he was an optimist,” Cooper said of Otto Frank at his house on Cape Cod recently. “He always believed the world would be right in the end, and he based that hope on the young people.”
As the German army occupied the Netherlands, the Franks hid in the attic of Otto Frank’s office in Amsterdam. But they were eventually discovered and sent to concentration camps, where 15-year-old Anne, her elder sister and her mother died — among an estimated 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis.
Otto Frank was the only family member to survive, living to publish his daughter’s diary two years later and dedicate his days to speaking about the atrocities of the Holocaust.
As Anne Frank’s 90th birthday approaches, Edna Friedberg, a historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, said it’s important to remember the sacrifices Otto and others made to keep her legacy alive.
“Otto Frank never had to publish that diary. As a parent in mourning, he could have kept this to himself,” she said. “But he gave it as a gift to humanity because he saw that it spoke to something bigger. He took that charge, and ran with it for the rest of his life.”
The museum will digitize and eventually make Cooper’s collection available online. It totals more than 80 letters, including his correspondence with some of the people who aided the Frank family during the war, and a number of modest family keepsakes.