Letters From Anne Frank’s Father Now at U of South Carolina

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A girl has given the College of South Carolina 100 playing cards and letters she obtained as a woman and younger girl from Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank.

Cara Wilson-Granat first wrote to Otto Frank in 1957, when she was 12 and had simply auditioned for a film primarily based on the diary that Anne Frank wrote whereas in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam.

Final yr, Wilson-Granat printed a memoir about her life and their correspondence, which lasted till Frank’s dying in 1980.

Wilson-Granat wrote on her web site that he grew to become her mentor and “sensible ‘grandfather,’ as he was for a lot of, many others worldwide.”

She has now given Frank’s letters to the college’s Anne Frank Heart, which opened in September as a companion to the Anne Frank Home in Amsterdam, The Publish and Courier reported.

“The letters are going to have a life the place there’s dialogue,” Wilson-Granat stated throughout a information convention Wednesday. “We have already got had the scholars sitting down they usually’re speaking about antisemitism and racism and bullying and there’s a lot that I imagine that we will develop from these letters.”

The donation establishes the Anne Frank Archive on this planet’s fourth Anne Frank Heart.

Its director, Doyle Stevick, stated he hopes others can be impressed to ship it letters from Otto Frank. There could also be hundreds of undocumented letters from him, Stevick stated.

“I pray that these letters will be retrieved and we learn them,” Wilson-Granat advised The Publish and Courier. “You’re studying about individuals who have given up hope, and he helped them.

She heard in regards to the heart from a buddy who additionally had corresponded with Frank. They and a 3rd correspondent visited the middle earlier than Wilson-Granat determined to donate her letters.

A senior researcher from the Anne Frank Home, Gertjan Broek, stated the letters cowl matters such because the JFK assassination, antisemitism and racism in america, the civil rights motion and battle within the Center East.

The Anne Frank Heart, positioned within the Barringer Home on USC’s Columbia campus, particulars the lifetime of Anne Frank and her household, who entered what Anne Frank referred to as “The Secret Annex” in 1942. They had been found two years later and despatched to focus camps, the place all however Otto Frank died.

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