Guest Lecture: Joan Adler

"For the Sake of the Children: The Letters Between Otto Frank and Nathan Straus, Jr.," Joan Adler, author, historian and executive director of the Straus Historical Society.

Adler is a historian, researcher, author and public speaker. She is the author of "For the Sake of the Children: The Letters Between Otto Frank and Nathan Straus, Jr." and compiler/editor of several other books about the German-Jewish families she researches.  

Her talk focuses on the discovery of a file containing letters written in 1941 between Frank and Straus. These letters reveal, for the first time, that Frank, the father of diarist Anne Frank, recognized the danger his family faced and was anxious to leave Amsterdam. Straus was Otto’s roommate at Heidelberg University and remained his lifelong friend. In 1941, when these letters were written, Straus was the director of the U.S. Housing Administration in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. Straus had the ear of the president and was a friend of FDR’s wife Eleanor.