Certainly this was the case with my grandfather, among whose effects, after he died in 1980, we were shocked to find a cache of desperate letters from an older brother in Poland, written throughout 1939, begging for money, affidavits for visas, anything to save him and his family — or indeed, save any or all of his four teenage daughters, girls around Anne Frank’s age. That my grandfather never mentioned this correspondence to us was an indication of the shattering guilt he must have felt at not having been able to help his family. It was a feeling shared by many Jews in America after the war, who are likely to have kept such feelings similarly hidden from their children and grandchildren.

As with any genre, such letters had their characteristic tropes. There’s the uneasy opening, hovering between an emphasis on the writer’s desperate situation and an awkward acknowledgment that his relationship to the addressee is perhaps not of recent vintage. To an old college friend Otto Frank wrote, “I would not ask if conditions here would not force me to do all I can in time to be able to avoid worse ...Perhaps you remember that we have two girls.” A similarly agonizing tension colors the letters of my great-uncle, Samuel Jäger. “You’ll be wondering ... why I’m writing to you after so many years,” one of them begins, although he soon gives the reason in this and many other letters: “From reading the papers you know a little about what the Jews are going through here, but what you know is just one one-hundredth of it.”

There is, too, the painful appeal for money. Otto Frank, we learn from the new documents, needed a $5,000 deposit to obtain a visa. “You are the only person I know that I can ask,” he wrote his college friend. “Would it be possible for you to give a deposit in my favor?” Virtually the same stiff entreaty echoes eerily through my great-uncle’s letter to a rich cousin: “Many families have already emigrated to America provided that their families there put down a $5,000 deposit ... perhaps you could manage to advance me the deposit.” My relative added, with a poignant naïveté, that his next letter would be addressed to Franklin Roosevelt himself — a futility that the more sophisticated, better-connected Otto Frank knew enough to spare himself.

Above all, such letters demonstrate movingly the overriding preoccupation that nothing was as important as saving the children. “It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for,” Otto Frank wrote. “If only the world were open and I’d been able to send a child to America or Palestine, it would be easier,” my great-uncle mourned as he started losing hope. Even after seven decades, such expressions of personal tenderness by people in the process of being overwhelmed by the tsunamis of history cannot fail to move us.

Expressions of the personal in the face of seemingly impersonal forces — reminders that each of the millions who were lost was, indeed, a recognizable person — are what made Anne Frank and her family famous in the first place. Now, as the voices of those who would deny or diminish the Holocaust grow louder with each passing year, drowning out the fading chorus of the witnesses and survivors, the equally human voice of her father, audible once more, will similarly draw the world’s attention to parts of the drama that took place an ocean away from the secret annex: in particular, to the appalling failure by the United States to do more for would-be immigrants. (Among other things, Frank’s letters are a concrete reminder of the crushing diplomatic obstacles facing would-be immigrants, a fatal Catch-22 that even American diplomats at the time were shamed by.)