Desperate letters: newly discovered letters written by Anne Frank's father, Otto, chronicle his anguished efforts to get his family into the United States.

• Author: Cohen, Patricia
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

On April 30, 1941, Anne Frank's father, Otto, wrote to his close American college friend Nathan Straus Jr. begging for help in getting the Franks out of German-occupied Amsterdam and into the United States.

"I would not ask if conditions here would not force me to do all I can in time to be able to avoid worse," Frank wrote in a letter that is part of a 78-page stack of newly discovered documents. "Perhaps you remember that we have two girls. It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for. Our own fate is of less importance."

World War II was under way, and the Nazis were rounding up European Jews to be sent to concentration camps. In 1933, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany, Frank moved his family from Frankfurt to Amsterdam. But by 1941, the Germans had occupied the Netherlands.

Frank needed a $5,000 deposit to obtain a visa and Straus--director of the Federal Housing Authority, a friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and the son of one of the owners of Macy's--had money and connections. "You are the only person I know that I can ask," Frank wrote. "Would it be possible for you to give a deposit in my favor?"

That letter begins a correspondence--unknown until now--revealing the Frank family's desperate efforts to escape to the U.S. or Cuba. The papers had been sitting in a New Jersey warehouse for nearly 30 years before they were discovered in 2005. (Due to privacy and copyright issues, the papers weren't released until February of this year.)

Each page adds a layer of sorrow as the tortuous process for gaining entry to the U.S.--involving sponsors, large sums of money, affidavits, and proof of how an immigrant's entry would benefit America--is laid out.

Ultimately, neither connections nor money were enough to enable the Franks--and most other European Jews--to enter the United States. Immigration laws passed by Congress in the 1920s severely limited the number of Jewish immigrants, and the State Department tightened its restrictions on all immigration due to the war.

By June 1941, no one with close relatives in Germany was allowed into the U.S. because of concerns that the Nazis could use those relatives to blackmail refugees into being spies or saboteurs. This closed off the possibility of getting Anne and her sister, Margot, out through a children's rescue agency, or having Otto Frank emigrate first in the hope that the rest of his family could follow later.

INTO HIDING

A month later, after...