After matriculating with distinction from the Amsterdam Lyceum, I was persuaded by my mother and Otto Frank to take up photography, and in 1949 I worked as an apprentice in a photographic studio in Amsterdam. But I found it difficult to settle down after my experiences and I decided to leave Holland for a while.
Otto arranged for me to work in London in a large photo-studio in Woburn Square which belonged to an old friend of his. I stayed in a boarding house where I met Zvi Schloss, an economics student from Israel who was working for a stockbroking firm while completing his studies. We were married in Amsterdam in 1952 and Otto was a witness at our wedding.
We set up home in England where our three daughters were born. Caroline (who was born in 1956) is a London lawyer, Jacky (born in 1958) is a beautician; she is married to Dag Hovelson, a Norwegian, and they live in London with their baby daughter, Lisa (born in 1985). Sylvia, our youngest daughter (born in 1962), also lives in London and works as a journalist.
I continued working as a freelance photographer until 1972 and then I started an antiques business which I still run in north-west London.
Fritzi (Mutti) married Otto in 1953 (making me the posthumous step-sister of Anne Frank) and left Holland for Basle, Switzerland, to join Otto’s mother, sister and brother who had remained there during the war. She worked with Otto on the vast correspondence involved in the publication of Anne’s Diary, but she visited me frequently in England – and still does. Otto came to regard my three girls as his grandchildren. Mutti and Otto shared twenty-seven happily married years until Otto’s death in 1980.
Mutti’s mother and father (my grandparents) died in England, her father in 1952 and her mother in 1968. My aunt Sylvia (Mutti’s sister) died of cancer in 1977, grieving for her youngest son, Jimmy, who was born in England and who died from a brain haemorrhage after a rugby match at the age of twenty-five.
Minni, our cousin who had saved Mutti’s life and supported us with her strength and kindness in the hospital block in Birkenau, miraculously survived the death march out of the camp and returned to Prague after the war. Her two teenage sons, Peter and Stephan, had been taken by her sister to Palestine before the war and she rejoined them there in 1947. She spent many active years caring for new immigrants and the elderly. Her younger son Stephan was killed at the age of twenty, fighting in the 1948 War of Independence. She grieved for him until her death in 1984.
Franzi also survived and was liberated in Germany by the Americans. She had contracted tuberculosis and after repatriation to Holland was bedridden for several years under the constant care of devoted friends and her sister, Irene. She finally made a complete recovery and she lives today in Israel with Irene. She, Mutti and I visit each other frequently.
Rootje lost her husband and, despite finding her daughter Judy, she never entirely recovered from her experiences and frequently suffered from depression. She died in 1984. Judy is happily married with two children. She, Mutti and I became close friends.
Kea lost all her family. She became an art teacher, married an Indonesian and lives in The Hague.
The final words are for Heinz and Pappy.
On 8 August 1945 a letter from the Red Cross arrived at our apartment (at about the same time that Otto learned that Anne and Margot had died in Bergen-Belsen). It said that after the forced march from Auschwitz, Heinz had died of exhaustion in April 1945 at Mauthausen.
Pappy, who could not have known that Mutti had been saved or that I would survive the terrible ordeal, probably gave up hope and died three days before the end of the war.
They have no graves. Their names are engraved with hundreds of others on a memorial monument in Amsterdam.
This is also their story.