A painting from the sketchbook of Edgar Reich, a 19-year-old Austrian-Jewish artist who died in the Holocaust, shows him walking with Dorrit Frank, the author’s mother. Photo / Courtesy of Gordon F. Sander
In the fall of 1942, a member of the Dutch resistance to the Nazis brought a package to the door of a fugitive German-Jewish family who had gone into hiding in a small apartment in The Hague.
The man who answered the door was my grandfather, an art dealer named Myrtil Frank. The package contained a sketchbook by Edgar Reich, a 19-year-old Austrian-Jewish emigre artist and the fiance of Frank’s daughter, my mother Dorrit. On the cover was a photo of Edgar, looking his debonair self.
Dorrit had last seen Edgar that May at Kamp Westerbork, a refugee camp in Holland’s far north that the German occupiers had recently transformed into a deportation camp. Enclosed with the sketchbook was a photo of Edgar at Westerbork in his work clothing with a shovel. He looked forlorn. But at least he was alive.
“Yours forever,” he had written on the back of the snapshot, along with the date: “Westerbork 25 June 1942.”
The four Franks — Myrtil, Dorrit, her sister Sybil and my grandmother, Flory — passed the sketchbook around in shocked silence. The fact Edgar had managed to smuggle it out of the closely guarded police camp was nothing short of miraculous.
Edgar wouldn’t survive the Holocaust. But the carefully painted watercolour images of Dorrit and Edgar’s romance would outlive them both.
The Franks, who had fled Berlin for the Netherlands in 1933, were comfortably ensconced in Scheveningen, the seaside annex of The Hague, when Germany invaded neutral Holland in 1940 and began a two-year cat-and-mouse game with the 140,000 Jews living there.
In September of that year, the Franks were forced to move to the inland city of Hilversum where they rented a comfortable house. That is where Dorrit met Edgar.
Every Saturday, a group of young emigres gathered at the Franks’ house to play cards and support one another. Edgar’s family were among the last wave of the 30,000 German and Austrian Jews who escaped to the Netherlands. Edgar worked as a commercial artist in Utrecht, and he joined the Saturday gatherings in the fall of 1941.
Dorrit and Edgar were initially only friends. But in January 1942, while Dorrit walked Edgar to his train, they shared their first kiss.
The romance developed as they took long walks in the Hilversum woods and danced cheek to cheek to Ole Guapa, their favourite song, playing on the Franks’ gramophone. There was talk of marriage. They had even begun shopping for a ring.
“We wanted to get married after the end of the war — whenever that would be,” Dorrit later told me.
The couple’s romantic idyll burst several days later when the Reichs received a summons from the Jewish Council, the nominally independent Jewish organisation the Germans tasked with managing the captive Jewish population during the initial phase of the Dutch Holocaust. They were to report to Westerbork. Dorrit accompanied them to the station on February 12.
“I will never forget the hissing of the train as it left for Westerbork,” she said. “It enhanced the feeling of foreboding. Still, no one knew what truly awaited at the end of the line. Otherwise, of course, he wouldn’t have gone. But we forced ourselves to believe that everything would be all right.”
In May, Dorrit, whose family had been forcibly moved to Amsterdam, received permission to visit her boyfriend and his parents. She brought her ID, stamped with the letter J, as she embarked on the 180km journey to Westerbork, first by train to Assen on the German border, then to a farmhouse where she spent the night, and finally on bicycle to the camp itself.
Conditions at Westerbork didn’t strike Dorrit as particularly oppressive. The Reichs had their own cottage, with a hot plate Edgar’s mother used to cook dinner. Before Dorrit departed, Edgar introduced his girlfriend to his campmates. Then, after a final kiss and a promise to return, Dorrit bicycled back to catch her train.
But Westerbork was not as congenial as it may have seemed. “The Dutch, Germans and the Jewish Council all tried to make it appear that Westerbork was not a concentration camp and not sinister,” said Halik Kochanski, author of Resistance, a 2022 history of the organised resistance to the German occupation of Europe. “But of course it was.”
The illusion was shattered on July 1, 1942, when the SS, the Nazi paramilitary unit, seized control of Westerbork from its Dutch administrators and transformed the minimum-security, visitors-allowed refugee camp into Police Transit Camp Westerbork, complete with barbed wire and a watchtower.
It was during this time that Edgar, probably sensing his fate, appears to have started work on his sketchbook.
On July 15, the first train left the Netherlands for Auschwitz with Edgar on board. Ninety-seven trains would depart over the next two years, carrying 98,000 Dutch Jews to the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland. The second-to-last train to Auschwitz would carry 15-year-old Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who shared Dorrit’s German-Jewish emigre background and last name, though they were not related.
But Dorrit and her family escaped that fate. A day before Edgar’s departure, the Franks had made their own harrowing — and illegal — train trip to The Hague where they went into hiding in an apartment at 14 Pieter van der Zaandestraat that belonged to Dorrit’s English teacher.
That winter, Dorrit’s friend, Jeanne Houtepen, who was working with the resistance to the Nazis, delivered Edgar’s sketchbook.
How and with whose help had Edgar managed to smuggle the package out of Westerbork to the Dutch resistance? How had the resistance in turn managed to connect Houtepen with the Franks? None of this was clear, nor is it any clearer eight decades later.
But at the moment, the Franks were not in a mood to ask questions. All that mattered was the sheer fact and wonder of the beauteous object Dorrit was holding in her trembling hands.
Sixty years later, when I interviewed my mother for a history of my family and the Dutch Holocaust, The Frank Family That Survived, she struggled to convey how she felt as she turned the pages of the delicate, hand-bound 11.5cm-by-15cm sketchbook.
She thumbed past the depictions of their phone call, of Edgar’s train to Hilversum, of the couple dancing to Ole Guapa, of their walk through the woods.
The final artwork was a pencil drawing of the couple walking to a jeweller to buy an engagement ring, as they had dreamed. Evidently, Edgar didn’t have time to complete that page before he was deported.
The last seven pages of the book were blank.
Dorrit closed the book.
“I knew he was gone,” she remembered later.
He was. In 2003, I visited the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, which holds the scrupulous records the Germans kept of the deportations. There, on the page for R, were the three Reichs and the date they were deported: July 15, 1942.
Edgar was never heard from again.
But Dorrit still had the sketchbook.
It became my mother’s most cherished possession during the three horrific years the Franks spent in hiding, before they finally emerged into the light of freedom in May 1945, when Holland was liberated.
Dorrit and her sister moved to New York in 1947. There, Dorrit met another German-Jewish emigre, my father Kurt, who had come to the United States before the war and served as an intelligence officer in General George Patton’s Third Army, rising to the rank of captain. They married in 1949.
But Dorrit, who died in 2014 at the age of 93, never forgot Edgar. Occasionally, over the years, she shared the book with appreciative friends, including Asher Miller, a curator of European art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“That the sketchbook made its way to Dorrit and helped in some way to sustain her is a miracle in itself,” Miller said.
He added, “I cannot say whether and to what extent this is reflected in other works of art produced under similar conditions. But the truth is that the sketchbook’s survival, like that of the person for whom it was made, is exceptional in every way.”
Holly Phillips, a senior collections manager at the museum’s Watson Library, which houses a growing collection of Holocaust art publications, recently saw the book for the first time. She called it “an engaging and beautiful document of a romantic relationship during the Holocaust years”.
Kochanski, the resistance historian, agreed the sketchbook was a testament to the power of love, as well as Edgar’s artistic talent. But it was more than that, she said: “It was an act of resistance.”
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