Ich suche · Aufbau, 7 September 1945

Ich suche. I am searching. Someone was still searching. Arthur May set it down in Manhattan, thousands of miles from Merwedeplein 37. He knew the dates. He knew the mother. He did not yet know the space between Amsterdam and Bergen-Belsen.

Ich Suche · Margot and Annelies Marie Frank · Aufbau, 7 September 1945
Vol. XI, No. 36, p. 602 · Leo Baeck Institute · Internet Archive

ICH SUCHE:
MARGOT BETTY FRANK, geb. 16. Feb. 1925 in Frankfurt a. M.
ANNELIES MARIE FRANK, geb. 12. Juni 1929 in Frankfurt a. M., bis 1944 Amsterdam, 37 Merwedeplein. Mutter Edith Frank, geb. Holländer, starb im Lager Birkenau.
Auskunft erbeten an: Arthur May, 37 E. 54th Street, New York 18, N.Y. Tel.: AT 9-6571.

Arthur May was an in-law relative of Otto Frank. He placed the notice from a Manhattan address. He gave the information he had: born in Frankfurt; last known at Merwedeplein 37, Amsterdam; their mother dead at Birkenau.

The address on this notice is the same address recorded on the Westerbork register card a year earlier. Two documents, written from opposite sides of catastrophe: one by a state bureaucracy, one by family still searching. Between them lay deportation, Auschwitz, a winter at Bergen-Belsen, liberation, and months of waiting. Same street. Same number. The state recorded her departure on a pink card. Family searched for her on a printed page.

Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam on 3 June 1945. He had learned of Edith's death during the journey. He still hoped for news of his daughters. On 18 July, he received the news that Anne and Margot had died in Bergen-Belsen. This notice ran seven weeks later. The information had not yet caught up with the searching.

The exact dates of Margot and Anne Frank's deaths are not known. Current research places both deaths in February 1945. Margot died first; Anne died shortly after. Their bodies were among the dead buried in the mass graves of Bergen-Belsen. The British 11th Armoured Division liberated the camp on 15 April 1945.

The printed notice does not carry any of this yet. It is still asking.

Aufbau was a German-language Jewish refugee publication in New York. It began in December 1934 as a newsletter of the German-Jewish Club of New York and became one of the central newspapers of the German-speaking Jewish exile community. By the end of the war, its pages carried personal notices, births, deaths, anniversaries, and long columns of search notices. Relatives in America looking for relatives in Europe. Each notice a column inch. Each one a question that had not yet been answered.

From 1 September 1944 through 27 September 1946, the paper also printed lists of Jewish Holocaust survivors located in Europe. Those lists eventually included 33,557 names. The Frank notice is not one of those survivor-list entries. It is one of the smaller individual notices, placed by a relative who did not yet know.

Sources: Aufbau, Vol. XI, No. 36, 7 September 1945, p. 602, digitised at archive.org from the Leo Baeck Institute collection; Leo Baeck Institute / Internet Archive image of the full Ich Suche column; Anne Frank Stichting / research.annefrank.org; JewishGen / USHMM Aufbau Database; Anne Frank House research on the deaths of Anne and Margot Frank.

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