Past and present histories of Jewish communities and culture in AT, DE
Above/featured: Grinzing cemetery, facing southeast. Photo, 26 May 2022.
Opening for its first burial in 1830, the Grinzing Cemetery in Vienna’s 19th district is modest in size, spread over an area of about 4.1 hectares (10 acres) and home to over 5000 graves. I highlight a number of notable people in arts and architecture, including connections with composer Gustav Mahler.
Above: “It’s a miracle I’m still alive”, Otto Frank. Photo, 17 Jun 2023 (X70).
Frank Family Centre, Jewish Museum Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main is a city I’ve visited countless times since 2001, but I hadn’t known until recently that Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were born in Frankfurt am Main, or that their parents, Otto and Edith, had lived in Frankfurt for almost ten years before moving their family to Amsterdam in early-1934. I’ve put together a list of places and traces the Frank family spent and left in Frankfurt am Main.
Here I cast light on the Frank Family Center (FFC), both memorial and historical record of the European-Jewish Frank family which was added to the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt (JMF) in 2020. Having begun in 2012, the Frank Family Center brings together an extensive collection of material belonging to the Frank-Elias families. The archive includes photographs, official documents, hand-written letters, art, books, household items, and furniture. The items provide a glimpse into the lives of the Frank- and Elias-families across Europe; there’s happy times, catastrophe and loss, and the strength gained in survival. The FFC has been designed for the public to view a part of the archive on permanent display in an open museum setting, as well as for research parties to pursue various avenues of academic inquiry.
Upon entry into the space, the first panel includes the following introductory text which I’ve modified to improve clarity.
The Jewish Museum Frankfurt holds a large number of objects belonging to Anne Frank’s family who had lived in Frankfurt for several generations.Between 1929 and 1933, the entire family departed Frankfurt am Main and established new lives in Basel, Paris, Amsterdam, and London. In 1942 Amsterdam, Otto and Edith Frank, along with their daughters, Margot and Anne, went into hiding to escape imminent deportation. In August 1944, the secret location was revealed to the authorities, and the family was detained, and deported to Auschwitz. Of the four in the family, only Otto Frank survived, who subsequently devoted the rest of his life to acquainting and educating the world with the diary of his murdered daughter, Anne.
In 1933, Anne’s paternal grandmother Alice Frank sold their home in Frankfurt am Main, and moved to Basel to join her daughter, Leni Elias, and her family. Alice was able to take some of the family belongings with her from Frankfurt to Switzerland, including personal photos and documents. Her moving boxes also contained furniture, porcelain, silverware, and paintings. The family’s heritage as documents of their previous lives in Frankfurt was carefully preserved in Basel.
This room of the Frank Family Center provides an introduction to this family heritage and to the history of the Frank and Elias families.
Above: The Frank family in happier times; seen left-to-right are Margot, Otto, Anne, and Edith, respectively. Display at the Frank Family Centre at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt, 17 Jun 2023 (X70).
I hadn’t realized how long an impression would last, decades after having read in high-school the diary of a young girl stuck in hiding for years. Much later down the line and standing in front of a house in a quiet neighbourhood in a German city, I could almost hear the laughter of children in the backyard and the gentle rebuke of a mother to one of her daughters, years before one of the girls ever considered writing her thoughts down into a book.
The story of Anne Frank and her family are well known. Her father and businessman Otto Frank moved his family from Frankfurt am Main to Amsterdam in 1934 to escape increasing Nazi discrimination against Jews. Otto survived capture, deportation, and time in the camps; but his wife and two daughters did not. After liberation in 1945, Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam and wrote letters to relatives in Basel. He learned how the diary written by his daughter Anne had been carefully hidden; reading her daughter’s thoughts would change the remaining course of his life. In the early-1950s, he moved to Basel, Switzerland, to be closer to his sister’s family. He and his extended family spent time and energy for the rest of their lives dedicated to translation efforts and the distribution of Anne’s diary as a document of family memory, world history, and essential education; and to the collection of memories and belongings of lost family members. Otto died in 1980, and is buried in Birsfelden cemetery, just east of Basel proper.
Much of the story has been written about the Frank family’s time in Amsterdam, but I hadn’t been aware of the family roots in Frankfurt am Main, despite my countless times passing through and multiple stays in the city since 2001 when I moved to Heidelberg. I wanted to learn about their time in Frankfurt am Main, before the family left for Aachen and Amsterdam in 1933–1934. What follows below is my examination of some of the places and traces left behind by the Frank family in Frankfurt am Main.
ANNELIES Marie Frank, daughter: b/✵ 12 June 1929, Frankfurt am Main – d/✟ March 1945, Bergen-Belsen.
EDITH Frank (née Holländer), mother: b/✵ 16 January 1900, Aachen – d/✟ 6 January 1945, Auschwitz.
MARGOT Betti Frank, daughter: b/✵ 16 February 1926, Frankfurt am Main – d/✟ March 1945, Bergen-Belsen.
OTTO Heinrich Frank, father: b/✵ 12 May 1889, Frankfurt am Main – d/✟ 19 August 1980, Birsfelden.
Above: In front of the Justizpalast (Palace of Justice) at the corner of Benjamin-Ferencz-Platz and Fürther Strasse in Nuremberg, Germany.
On 20 November 1945, an extraordinary trial got under way in the German city of Nuremberg, only six months after the Nazis surrendered to the Allied nations in World War 2. For the first time in modern history, an assembled tribunal of international judges presided over trials against top leaders of a nation for crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to carry out these crimes.
What is called the “Nuremberg Trials” refers primarily to the “Major War Criminals Trial” where over 20 leaders in German Nazi high command were put on trial before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) from November 1945 to October 1946. The IMT consisted of judges from each of the four Allied nations: Great Britain, France, United States, and the U.S.S.R. Subsequently from late-1946 to 1949, 12 additional trials were held before American military tribunals to uncover and highlight the extent and depth to which additional leaders in German society supported the Nazi dictatorship.
“… The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.”– Opening statement by Robert H. Jackson, U.S. chief prosecutor, on the second day of the Nuremberg Trials (Major War Criminals Trial), 21 November 1945; see Sources below.
Featured: Alter Markt, facing southwest to the former Schloss Blieskastel at upper-centre: Blieskastel, Saarland, Germany (X70).
David Oppenheimer: ✵ 1 January 1834 – 31 December 1897 ✟
As a child of the city, I learned the name of Vancouver’s 2nd mayor, David Oppenheimer, who served in the top post from 1887 to 1891. Escaping the violent revolutions spreading through Europe, David Oppenheimer and his brothers had long been immigrants from Germany, and after time in New Orleans and California, they arrived in what is now southwestern British Columbia and developed business success with their supply stores during the Gold Rush, and with wholesale trade and real estate in the newly incorporated city of Vancouver, where the national railway established its western terminus one year later in 1887. The Oppenheimers stamped their civic legacy not only with the location of the railway terminus, but also with an expansive infrastructure program including a new grand city park, fire department, extensive roadworks, a city-wide electricity grid, streetcar public transport network, and a city cemetery. On 11 April 2008, the Government of Canada’s Historic Sites and Monuments Board designated David Oppenheimer as a National Historic Person.
There’s little doubt the Oppenheimers spent plenty of time in what are now Vancouver’s Chinatown and Strathcona with their business interests and connections to the city’s Jewish community. These are neighbourhoods, respectively, where my parents sought closer ties with the Chinese-Canadian community, and where they bought a new house to raise their family. Decades later, I’ve flown out from Vancouver, and I’ve been on the train from Frankfurt to southwest Germany’s Saarbrücken for its proximity to the Völklingen Ironworks world heritage site. I also recently learned David Oppenheimer was from the area and born in the city of Blieskastel. I arrange to meet with a representative of Stadtarchiv Blieskastel (city archive), and I make my way to Blieskastel to see what I can learn about the Oppenheimer family.
Fotoeins Fotografie 