Salvaging Their Stories
WHEN OTTO FRANK RETURNED to Amsterdam from Auschwitz after World War II, he was alone, his wife and two daughters having perished in Nazi concentration camps. But Miep Gies, who had helped his family in hiding, gave Frank the papers his daughter Anne had left behind. Among them was the diary he would publish, now among the most iconic of Holocaust artifacts.
For all that was lost in the war and the genocide, there were also precious acts of salvage. With each passing year, new letters and manuscripts and memories surface — insistent reminders of lives, like Anne Frank’s, derailed or extinguished, and of
