Anne Frank’s Iowa pen pal
Juanita Wagner didn’t know it at the time, but a piece of history landed in her family’s mailbox 80 years ago in southeast Iowa.
It was the first and only letter from her Dutch pen pal, who signed off with her full name, Annelies Marie Frank. It was dated April 29, 1940.
Eleven days later, the German army invaded the Netherlands. Two years after that, the Frank family went into hiding, and in February or March 1945 — no one knows exactly when — 15-year-old Anne died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany.
A copy of her letter to young Juanita is on display in Danville, a small town near Burlington, where it’s receiving renewed attention 75 years after the end of the Holocaust and World War II.
“This story was on the BBC two years ago and, boy, that just broke everything loose,” said Janet Hesler, who curates the Anne Frank Connection at the Danville Station, a combination museum and library.
The permanent exhibit features World War II timelines — global, national and local — plus a replica of the Amsterdam attic where the Franks hid for more than two years and where Anne wrote her famous diary. The exhibit also displays a copy of the letter Anne’s older sister, Margot, sent to Juanita’s older sister, Betty.
The unlikely pen-pal exchange was arranged by a Danville teacher named Birdie Mathews, who traveled the world during her summer vacations. During a trip to Europe, she met some teachers at the Montessori school Anne and Margot attended in Amsterdam, where the Franks had moved in 1933 to escape anti-Semitism in their native Germany.
Back home in Iowa, Mathews set up the exchange to help her students to think beyond the boundaries of their own small town. So Juanita and Betty wrote a pair of letters to Anne and Margot and eagerly awaited a reply. They were surprised when two letters arrived in English — probably translated with help from Anne and Margot’s father, Otto, who had spent some time in New York.
Anne’s letter, in her own tidy handwriting, outlines her life at school and mentions a friend who wanted to correspond with a pen pal of her own — but “not with a boy.” She enclosed a postcard from Amsterdam.
The Wagners never heard from the Frank sisters again. After the war, Betty Wagner sent a note to the same Amsterdam address and eventually received a heartbreaking reply from Otto Frank. His wife and daughters had died in the concentration camps.
“We all cried,” Betty Wagner explained in a video interview at the Danville museum. Until then, she hadn’t even known the Franks were Jewish.
She tucked the letters in a shoebox. The family moved to California in the 1950s. Life moved on.
But in 1956, when Betty Wagner heard a radio story about a new Broadway play called the “The Diary of Anne Frank,” she immediately remembered the name.
“When I got home, I ran upstairs to find the letters,” she said.
She showed them to friends over the years and, eventually, to someone who worked to memorialize the estimated 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. The letters were sold for $150,000 at a New York auction and donated to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, a human rights organization where they remain today.
The Danville Station is the only site with permission to display copies.
Over the last few years, local students have collected 15,000 postcards from pen pals around the world. They’re trying to collect 1.5 million — one for each child who died in the Holocaust — and plan to display them at the museum.
“I’ve heard that if we gave a minute of silence to all the people who died in the Holocaust, we’d be silent for 11 and a half years,” said Hesler, the curator. “We should never forget what happened.”
At the Iowa Jewish Historical Society Museum in Waukee, visitors can learn about Holocaust survivors who settled in Iowa after the war. One exhibit displays items they brought with them — a ladle from Auschwitz, a pair of scissors from one of Schindler’s factories — and offers oral histories dating back to the 1980s. Many of the interviews have been digitized with grant funding from the State Historical Society of Iowa and shared with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
“That way, anyone in the world who wants to listen can hear those stories from the people who lived it,” said Sandi Yoder, who directs the Iowa Jewish Historical Society. “Oral histories make things come alive in some cases more than a book.”
Theater can do that, too. During a recent run of “The Diary of Anne Frank” at the Des Moines Community Playhouse, the actor Isabelle Piedras said she got to be “Anne’s voice of hope and love and her outstanding bravery.”
“No one is truly worthy of doing that but Anne herself,” she added, “but it’s a story that needs to be told, and I feel honored to be able to help share it.”
Isabelle said the play reminds people that “there is still good in the world, even if things seem bleak. You might have to look for it, but it’s there.”
Sometimes, you can find it in the mailbox.
— Michael Morain, Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs
