New York institute finds letters by Anne Frank's father

Newly disclosed letters written by the father of Anne Frank illuminate his desperate attempts to get the family out of the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, Time magazine reported on its Web site.

Photo: New York institute finds letters by Anne Frank's father

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a New York-based institution that focuses on the history and culture of Eastern European Jews, plans to release the roughly 80 documents Feb. 14, according to Time.com. A telephone message left at the institute early Thursday was not immediately returned.

The documents include letters that Otto Frank wrote to relatives, friends and officials between April 30, 1941, and Dec. 11, 1941, Time said.

His attempts to arrange a route out of the Netherlands were unsuccessful. The family took refuge in a neighbor's Amsterdam attic in July 1942, hiding there for more than two years before being arrested. Anne Frank, who later died in a concentration camp in Germany, described the family's life in hiding in a diary that has been read by an estimated 25 million or more people.

There are also letters from Frank's U.S. relatives and a friend, Nathan Straus Jr., the son of the founder of Macy's department store, according to the magazine.

Written when the U.S. consulate in the Netherlands had closed, the letters show how Otto Frank investigated potential escape routes through Spain to Portugal, attempted to secure visas to Paris and tried to arrange for his family to go to the United States or Cuba.

The letters were initially held by the New York City-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which gradually transferred its archives to the YIVO institute between 1948 and 1974, reports AP.

A volunteer archivist at YIVO discovered Otto Frank's letters about a year and a half ago, but the institute has kept the find quiet while exploring copyright and other legal issues, Time said.

Anne Frank died of typhus at age 15 at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945. Her father survived the war, returned to the Netherlands to collect his late daughter's notes and published them in the Netherlands in 1947. An English-language version followed in 1952.