The family of Anne Frank—a Dutch Jewish girl who became arguably the most famous victim of the Holocaust—tried to escape to the U.S. but were foiled by America’s slow-moving and restrictive immigration policy, researchers have discovered.
The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum said the Frank family’s failure to secure passage to the U.S., and later Cuba, forced them to go into hiding in Amsterdam as Nazi troops occupied much of Western Europe, the Associated Press reported.
Anne’s father Otto tried to secure application papers for American visas twice before his family retreated to their famous attic hideout on July 6, 1942. As the Netherlands was brought under the heel of German occupation, Otto wrote to a friend in the U.S. saying, “I am forced to look out for emigration and as far as I can see USA is the only country we could go to.”
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