Carol Ann Lee's impeccably researched portrait The Hidden Life of Otto Frank brings into sharp focus every facet of the extraordinary life, both charmed and cursed, of Otto Frank, the father of the most famous young girl of the twentieth century, Anne Frank. The publication of his daughter's diary, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, turned this quietly heroic man into a legend, but little until now has been known regarding the intimacies of Frank's life.
In this scholarly and definitive biography, Carol Ann Lee, author of the critically acclaimed Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank, provides the answer to one of the most heartbreaking and bewildering questions of modern times: Who betrayed Otto Frank and his family to the Nazis? Investigating this startling act of treachery and deceit, Lee brings to light never-before-documented information about Otto Frank and Tonny Ahlers, the individual who would ultimately claim responsibility for the betrayal-and their terrifying and complicated relationship that continued until the day Frank died. Otto Frank, born one month before Adolf Hitler, was raised in a wealthy German Jewish household that was a model of European Jewry. In World War I Frank proudly fought for Germany-which he believed to be his homeland--as an officer in the trenches of the Somme. In The Hidden Life of Otto Frank Lee documents these privileged early years, plus the happy years that Frank spent with his wife and daughters in Amsterdam before the onset of World War II. Then came their period in hiding, their eventual betrayal, and their internment in the death camps of Poland and Germany. For the first time ever, Otto Frank's experiences of life during and after Auschwitz-and during his return to Amsterdam, where, wholly destitute, he lost everything "except life"--are told in full detail. The subsequent discovery of his daughter Anne's diary and its publication is what literally helped Frank regain the dignity and strength to live his life. Deeply moving and powerfully honest, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank illuminates the complex personality of a brave, little-understood man whose story encompasses some of the most harrowing and memorable events of the last century. Less
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