The gentiles who hid Anne Frank - remembered on the 90th anniversary of her birthday and diary publishing

Anne Frank with her father Otto Frank in movie poster

Of all the personalities associated with Anne Frank, the most important figure, without whom Anne Frank would never have been able to write her diary, is perhaps the least known.

He is Victor Kugler, the Mr. Kraler of her diary. As the principal business partner of Otto Frank, Victor Kugler assumed managerial control of the Franks’ Amsterdam spice-importing business when Nazi persecution forced the Frank family into hiding. It was Victor Kugler who kept the business going and obtained food rations under what was the harshest German wartime occupation in all of Western Europe. Without Victor Kugler, Anne Frank and her family would have starved to death a month after going into hiding.

Victor Kugler visits Anne Frank statue in
Utrecht, Netherlands, 1975 Fair use, Link

For this heroism, Victor Kugler himself was arrested and sent to a series of German labor camps in Holland where he survived by his wits and finally escaped a few weeks before the end of the war. 

Several years after the end of the war, when the Dutch spice business collapsed following the Indonesian revolution that nationalized Dutch holdings, Victor Kugler emigrated to Toronto, Canada. There, he led a quiet life where nobody knew who he was and what he had done during the war. Only twenty years later he began to reveal his story. 


The modern-day saga of this Righteous Gentile, who was honored as such at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, is told here in semi-documentary style, largely in his own words as told to Torontonian, Eda Shapiro, herself of Eastern European Jewish background; and by many others who knew him, as compiled by well-known Toronto writer-journalist Rick Kardonne.

Interview (video) with Rick Kardonne, November 2014 at L.A. Museum of Tolerance: 

Q: Why is Victor Kugler the missing link in the Anne Frank saga? 

Rick Kardonne, writer, "The Man Who Hid Anne Frank"

A: Because, as the business manager for Otto Frank when he and his family and two other Jewish associates had to go into hiding (under what was the harshest Nazi German rule in Western Europe) he did the business management, he got the food, and he provided and with all kinds of entertainment magazines. 

Without Victor Kugler, the Franks and everyone else would have starved for a month. 

Q:  After a month?

A:  After a month - for lack of food and lack of business.

Grandchild blesses grandparents names inscribed as "Righteous
Among the Nations" at Yad vaShem Museum in Israel

Q:  How long was he able to sustain them?

A:  From June 1942 to August '44.

Q:  How did you come across this story?

A:  I wrote for the Canadian and Jewish publications for over 15 or 20 years. And one of those who read me who who led the Likud organization in Toronto, met Irving Naftolin, who was a World War Two vet.  Irving Naftolin was married to the late Edith Shapiro (not my Edith) but late Edith Shapiro - who was a teacher and journalist. She had all of the memoirs of Victor Kugler - who had lived in Toronto since 1955. Edith Shapiro took them in and after she died he brought them to me because of my journalistic activities for the Jewish press in Toronto. 

And I got the memoirs in a brown paper bag. My job was to take all of these notes out of the brown paper bag and organize them into a book and this is the result.

Q:  Is the lesson of Anne Frank and the righteous Gentiles who stood up for their Jewish neighbors- getting lost, do you feel, in this generation?

A:  In some quarters, yes, but in others, no.  We have an excellent publication in Toronto called the National Post that constantly brings up the righteous Gentiles. So among some media outlets yes, but not all of them.

Q:  Looking back at at the Holocaust and and it's lesson for today - if - and and we see this in France - we see the the society turning against their Jewish community their Jewish citizens  and it's spreading throughout Europe . . .

A: Yes?

Q:  Are there Gentiles who will stand up again to protect the Jews, and in fact, even those who express support for Israel which is ...

A:  I think there are good people, righteous Gentiles in every country. I think so.  


Q:  What were the risks that Victor undertook?

A:  Being caught by the Gestapo.  Which he was eventually and he was sent to a slave labor camp because he wasn't Jewish.  But the Franks and the Van Pels's were Jewish so they were sent to Auschwitz. Only the Red Army liberated them - they were sent to Bergen-Belsen where they died of disease. 

That was  three weeks before the British invaded and liberated them.

Q: What was special about Victor?

A:  He was a religious Lutheran - and he had friends - and he said "I had to do this for my friends."  He had grown up you know in unfavorable social circumstances - nothing to be about being Jewish because he wasn't Jewish.  But this left an imprint on him which he did for the rest of his life.

Q:  Was he typical of the Dutch public's attitude towards their Jewish neighbors?

A:  First of all he was born in Austria.  So he could have been but the Dutch were not a hundred percent sympathetic to the Jews like the Danes were. 

Q: So the Austrians weren't, the Dutch weren't, and yet because of his friendship ...

A: Yeah, with Otto Frank.  And the Swedes did receive all of the Danish Jewish refugees and  they were in Sweden for the rest of the war.

Q:  Is protecting Jews now a matter of history or would you consider it a potential for the future?

A: Both, both.

Q: Do you see anti-semitism as a potential resurgence?

A:  I do but I think that a lot of these so-called liberal media types are more responsible.  Actually in Canada, the very conservatives, if anything, are friendlier to Jews now

Q: But the CBC - would you consider them liberal press?


A: Liberal press -  and not very . . . occasionally they run a good piece but . . . not reliable.

Rabbis Hier and Cooper: Anne Frank at 90 – Six points she might have added to her diary today: 

Rabbis Abe Cooper and Marvin Hier of Simon Wiesenthal
Center in L.A. and Jerusalem (photo:Phil McCarten /Reuters)

Wednesday, June 12 would have been Anne Frank’s 90th birthday. Through her iconic diary, she has become the global symbol of 1.5 million other virtually forgotten innocent Jewish children murdered by Nazi Germany and its willing European collaborators during the Holocaust.

So how would she have updated her diary today? Here are six possibilities, according to Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center: 

1. Joy at the miraculous rebirth and flourishing of her shattered people in a Jewish democratic state of Israel.
2. Anger that the hatred of Jews is surging in her native Europe and beyond and is being deployed by leading left-wing politicians in England and right-wing politicians in Poland.
3. Shock that Synagogues and Jewish schools must be protected by armed guards throughout the world. Despair that decades after she and her family were forced into hiding, so many Jews in the 21st Century have to hide their identities in public; not just anywhere but in the streets of European capitals including, Berlin, Paris, and yes, her hometown of Amsterdam. Can history be repeating itself?
4. Solidarity with Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Prize winner ever, who risked her life to give hope to young girls everywhere to have the right to an education and a future. Sadness that Malala has to live today in England because her life would be in danger again the moment she stepped on the soil of her native Pakistan.
5. Disgust that the world, led by the United Nations does so little to protect children from being brainwashed to hate and become martyrs for religious fanatics, from becoming tools for tyrants and human shields for terrorists.
6. Cautious optimism and lurking pessimism about the power of the written and spoken word to bring about change through the amazing tool of social media. Anne wrote her original diary in the Secret Annex, having no idea if anyone else would ever read of her innermost thoughts, fears and hopes. Today, social media virally transmits all the good, bad, and ugly, that the human imagination can produce.

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