Pen pals cut short by war

Mark R. Madler

Growing up in rural Iowa in 1940, Betty Wagner and her younger

sister, Juanita, became pen pals with two girls in Amsterdam.

The correspondence between the two American farm girls and the two

Dutch schoolgirls was brief, as larger world events intervened.

“Within two weeks of the letters being postmarked, the Germans

invaded,” said Wagner, who has lived in Burbank for 45 years. “We

wondered all during the war, were they safe, were they hungry?”

The girls Wagner and her sister wrote to were Anne and Margot

Frank, and neither survived the war. The Frank sisters died from

typhus in March 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in

Germany.

After the war, “The Diary of Anne Frank” would tell the world of

the young girl’s story of her life hiding in Amsterdam before being

captured by the Nazis in 1944.

The story of Betty and Juanita Wagner’s brush with history is now

told in “Searching for Anne Frank” by Susan Goldman Rubin. The book

was published in November in association with the Simon Wiesenthal

Center, and targets a teen audience.

The story of the pen pals became a springboard for a history of

two sets of sisters and how the war affected them, Rubin said.

“I hope readers will learn a lesson of tolerance,” Rubin said. “I

hope people go back to read the diary or see the play [based on the

diary] and draw their own conclusions of the legacy of Anne Frank.”

The pen pal letters are kept in a vault at the Simon Wiesenthal

Center in Los Angeles while copies and a picture postcard sent by

Anne Frank are on display at the center’s Museum of Tolerance. Walker

and her sister auctioned off the letters in 1988, with an anonymous

donor bidding for them on behalf of the center.

Wagner and her sister began their correspondence through a teacher

who visited the Netherlands and returned with the names and addresses

of Dutch children wanting to trade letters with Americans.

“Juanita got that name, Anne Frank, and I got Margot,” Wagner

said. “Their letters came back written in English, which surprised

us.”

The Frank girls wrote their letters in Dutch, which their father

translated into English. The sisters then copied the trans- lations

and sent them to Iowa.

That the letters survived at all was remarkable, considering

Wagner and her sister had moved from Iowa to California. Wagner

admitted that for many years, she kept them in a copy of “The Diary

of Anne Frank” that sat on a bookshelf.

Lost to history, however, was the five-page letter Otto Frank sent

to Wagner after the war, in which he explained what happened to his

daughters.

Seeing the letters on display at the museum spurred Rubin to learn

more, since she had never heard of Anne Frank corresponding with an

American girl. Her research took her to Amsterdam, where she met

women who knew Frank when they were children, and to the small town

where the Wagners grew up.

Juanita Wagner Hiltgen, who lived in Redlands, died two years ago.