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Anne to compare the delights outside the annex with the privations inside it, and the present with the past. “Miep made our mouths water telling us about the food they had…. We, who get nothing but two spoonfuls of porridge for our breakfast and whose tummies were so empty that they were positively rattling, we, who get nothing but half-cooked spinach (to preserve the vitamins!) and rotten potatoes day after day, we, who get nothing but lettuce, cooked or raw, spinach and yet again spinach in our hollow stomachs. Perhaps we may yet grow to be as strong as Popeye, although I don’t see much sign of it at present!
    “If Miep had taken us to the party we shouldn’t have left any rolls for the other guests. If we had been at the party we should undoubtedly have snatched up the whole lot and left not even the furniture in place…. And these are the granddaughters of a millionaire. The world is a queer place!”
     
    T HOUGH not quite the millionaire his granddaughter imagined, Michael Frank was the founder of the Bank Michael Frank, based in Frankfurt, where Otto grew up in a close-knit, assimilated German-Jewish community, surrounded by art and good furniture. Servants. Parties every week.
    After one semester at Heidelberg, Otto left the university and traveled to New York with a school friend, Nathan Straus, whose family owned Macy’s department store. Otto worked at the store until, in 1909, he was called back to Germany to deal with the family finances in the aftermath of his father’s sudden death. Like his brothers Herbert and Robert, Otto served in the German army during World War I. As part of a range-finding unit, Otto fought with an infantry corps composed largely of surveyors and mathematicians. By the time the war ended, hehad been promoted to lieutenant, and in 1925 he married Edith Hollander, whose father ran a successful business dealing in scrap iron.
    Otto spent his early adulthood attempting to save the family bank as it gradually went under, weakened by political and personal crises: the war, hyperinflation, the stock market crash, the Great Depression, a scandal in which Otto’s brother Herbert was accused of illegal dealings in foreign securities, and the end of Weimar democracy.
    Though he has been charged with an ostrichlike refusal to understand the implications of the rise of National Socialism and to foresee the threat it would pose to his livelihood and his family, in fact Otto had a talent for apprising his situation and for operating under stress. Many years later, the producer and playwrights who brought Anne’s diary to Broadway remarked that Otto was not only the loving, grieving father of a murdered girl, but a gifted businessman who grasped the practical and financial ramifications of her diary’s success.
    Having opened and then liquidated a branch of the Michael Frank bank in Amsterdam, in the 1920s, Otto knew and liked the Dutch capital. He had made contacts there who would prove useful when, in 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor and the Nazis’ increasingly vicious anti-Jewish laws convinced him that the wisest option was to leave Germany and move his wife and daughters to the deceptive safety of Holland.
    Anne concludes the passage about the engagement party that Miep describes and about the Frank family’s fall from grace: “Daddy was therefore extremely well brought up and he laughed very much yesterday, when, for the first time in his fifty-five years, he scraped out the frying pan at the table.”
     
    T HE ENTRY dated June 20, 1942, continues: “… as we are Jewish, we emigrated to Holland in 1933 …” Like any skilled writerwisely determined to omit unnecessary details, Anne brings us directly to the emigration that became urgent as we are Jewish.
    In 1933, around the time that Nazi storm troopers initiated a boycott of German-Jewish businesses, the Franks bid good-bye to Frankfurt. Otto shut down the Michael Frank bank, left Edith and the girls with his