With the world’s focus on refugees and victims of war, the US have come under fire this week for their decision to close some of their borders across 19 states.
Governors from Michigan, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin have decided to either pause or call for an outright ban on accepting refugees after reports that one of the Paris attackers may have made his way to France disguised as a refugee seeking asylum.
Now new documents have emerged showing that the US government chose to deny visa applications for Anne Frank and her family in 1941.
According to Reuters, reports released last year show Otto Frank sending a series of letters and telegrams seeking help and money to obtain a US visa to flee from Europe.
Frank contacted a former classmate living in New York, Nathan Strauss, and asked him for a $5,000 deposit for a visa.
After the visa was denied, Strauss’ wife continued to seek help by appealing to a number of government officials. Unfortunately, none of these overruled the application.
A glimmer of hope for the Frank family came in December 1941, when the documents revealed that Cuba issued a visa, but it was later cancelled 10 days after Germany declared war on the US.
Reviewing the new documents, American University professor Richard Breitman told Reuters:
“If her father had sought help sooner, Anne Frank could be a 77-year-old woman living in Boston today, a writer. That is what the YIVO’s documents suggest.
“However, Otto Frank decided to try to escape just as the Nazis were making it more difficult to leave and the United States was making it more difficult to enter.”
Anne Frank, who kept a famous diary documenting her struggles of living in hiding with her family in a single room during World War II, died in the infamous Bergen-Belsen camp in 1945.
She was just 15-years old at the time.
