The hidden life of Otto Frank
"Otto Frank was the father of the most famous young girl of the twentieth century. The publication of Anne Frank's diary turned this quietly heroic man into a legend. Yet until now, apart from a few basic facts, almost nothing has been written about Otto's own extraordinary life." "Born a month before Adolf Hitler, Otto Frank grew up in a wealthy German Jewish household. In the First World War he fought as a German officer in the trenches of the Somme. The Hidden Life of Otto Frank brings to life these privileged early years, when Otto and his family were models of wholly assimilated European Jewry. It reveals the full story behind Otto's first, cruelly thwarted love affair, as well as the truth about his subsequent arranged marriage to Anne's mother." "After struggling to establish a business in Amsterdam, Otto and his family spent happy years together before the war. And then, of course, came their period in hiding, their eventual betrayal and their internment in the death camps of Poland and Germany. For the first time, Otto's experiences during and after Auschwitz are told in full, drawing upon excerpts from a previously unknown journal Otto kept from the day of his liberation until his return to Amsterdam where, wholly destitute, he had lost everything 'except life'. The subsequent discovery of his daughter's diary, and the publishing phenonmenon that ensued, helped him begin to recover."--BOOK JACKET.