AN ILLUSTRATED LOVE STORY
The Nazi's took my mother's boyfriend. His sketchbook preserved their
love.
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 émigré artist
and the fiancé 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, which 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 around the sketchbook in shocked silence. The
fact that 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 watercolor images of Dorrit and Edgar’s romance would
outlive them both...Read More + See Pictures
