who were dead. so the scene which the playwrights made up, the scene where mr. von daunt steals bread and everyone was angry at him never happened. otto was extremely upset. he felt the surviving relatives would be upset about that. so, yes, that's true. and she stopped -- her name was charlotte and she stopped speaking to olto after a while. yeah? >> in the journal, you quoted in [ inaudible ] a neighbor who said, god knows everything, and anne frank knows even more? >> uh-huh. >> and was that right? >> uh-huh. >> and would you talk a little bit about this side of anne frank? >> yes. this was the mother of her close friend lise, who is the subject of that nightmare that anne had. who survived, actually. anne was a piece of work as a

child. i mean, she was -- talkative. she was different. they was smart. one of these -- we all know them. some of us even were them. you know, one of these smart little girls who you just can't get to shut up so she was a discipline -- i mean, she was famously wrote this essay. was made to an essay by this teacher because she wouldn't stop talking in class. she would pop, dislocate her elbow, pop it out of her socket. she would do it all the time to entertain her friends. so that -- and she was very self-dramatizing too. all of those things, i think, were what her friend's mother meant, and in a society a culture in which most little girls were raised to be well behaved and, you know -- future wives and mothers, i think a little girl like anne was seen as a kind of subversive influence in that community. so that was part of it as well.

yeah? >> how did -- anne frank -- the proceeds from the [ inaudible ]. >> he -- >> [ inaudible ]. >> well, that -- there are two foundations, actually. there's the -- and it's quite complicated. well, for one thing, the first foundation that was formed raised the money to keep the house -- the house where the secret annex is, because it was being bought by some industrialist or something. and so they raised money. and at the beginning, a lot of the money went into restoring and keeping the house. then he started this human rights foundation, which as i said goes all over the world. the educational program is one program, but there are other programs they do. so a great deal -- you know, he was able to live. he didn't live like a rich person. i mean, he was -- you know, a lot of that money went into his foundation. there's a separate foundation. anne's one surviving relative, her cousin, still lives in

bozzal in widthland. two foundations, and also a human rights foundation, and they control the rights to anne's written work. the diary, whether it's made into a play and so forth. and, again, you know, they do things like, you know, an israeli-jewish-palestinian youth orchestra, a program to train teachers among the poorest of the poor in peru. both of these foundations are international human rights foundations, as they should be. yeah? >> [ inaudible ] did they ever find out precisely who -- i think one of the books actually said who actually portrayed them, because why, all of a sudden -- i think it was someone that -- otto worked with long ago and -- >> yeah. i mean, there have been -- there have been several explanations and several people accused.

the person who came in for the most scrutiny was a guy named von mahren who worked in the warehouse, always asking questions, because at several points the families upstairs got a little careless. so mr. von pels left his wallet downstairs, and then they noticed that von mahren, just a warehouseman, who -- it seemed to them leaving-- that is the helpers -- leaving little traps. because the families would come downstair, at night to detect whether someone had been downstairs. he was the most frequently suspected. then other suspicions fell on neighbors. of course, a number of break-ins. one theory was that the -- a guy supposedly blackmailing otto frank since the beginning of the invasion for an anti-nazi remark he made, but what was interesting to me was that otto essentially had, didn't have a

huge investment in finding out who did it. that wasn't -- his focus was not ever revenge, retribution and so forth. his focus was all about the future, really, and using the material to try and make a better future. >> what was it like to live with this -- live with anne frank for a couple of years? did you ever feel like -- >> no. i was -- it was very painful. i have to say, it wasn't -- i mean, i enjoyed reading the diary, and i was -- excited by many of the things that i found out, and each new discovery i made was thrilling to me, but the story is the story. i mean, what happened to her is what happened to her. so as i say in the book, i would make a kind of pact with myself,

you know, i would go for a week, ten day, maybe, without thinking, here was this amazing girl, this genius who was murdered for no reason at all in bergen besson and died in, typhus and, horribly, and when that reality would come back to me i would just have to quit working for a couple of days and do something else, and then i would think, oh, there's a reason to go on and i would go back to the book, but -- it's a painful subject. you know, you can go for a little while without thinking about the larger reality, but it's hard to go for very long. thank you. [ applause ]

next weekend on history book shelf, thomas kidd discusses his book "god of liberty." a religious history of the american revolution. in it the author examines the role religion played in the american revolution. pretending to worship freely was a cohesive factor. history book shelf airs three times each weekend on american history tv including saturday at noon eastern. next on american history tv, daniel sharfstein author of "the invisible line" discusses the complexity of race in america and one family's perceived transformation from black to white. the new york historical society hosted this hour-long event. good evening, everyone. good to be back here. my home away from home. lovely new room.

we're going to start -- what's the matter? [ laughter ] >> we're going to start by taking a little trip back in time. and we're going to a day in april of 1922. on the mall in washington somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people have gathered for the dedication of the lincoln memorial. there are parades, survivors from the civil war. people drove, they walks. there was an air of festivity throughout the town.

as you know, at the time -- and you may not know in this history -- washington is itself also in addition to be in the seat of the country, washington is the seat of the black elite of america. the black people who served in reconstruction governments in the south were driven out after the collapse of reconstruction, and many of them retreated to washington, d.c. we have there a pbs pinch back lieutenant governor of louisiana who comes there, the gentleman who was the senator from mississippi blanch k. bruce. we have many, many celebrities there. we have also howard university, which is itself a real seat of the black intelligence, too. so we have this town. we have this big celebration. people turn up to dedicate the memorial. the black elites who turn up, and they walk up to the platform area, because their tickets say

platform, get there and they're turned away. they're turned away to a segregated seating area about a block away, and it's a weedy area where there are rough hewn benches, and the grast has not been cut. these are lawyers, judges, and philosophers and many of them turn on their heels and they leave. one of them who temporarily takes a seat is a former collector of customs at georgetown. he and his wife. he's a famous black government official. and he's taking a seat, and they're cordoned off and presided over by uniformed marines. he's having a seat because he's making up his mind whether he's going to stay. the marine says to him, you should move to the center to make room for other people.

he sits back and says i'm thinking about it. the marine says you ought to think damn quick about moving. the segregated section erupts in protest. the black elite of washington, baltimore, they all stalk out. you can read accounts of the dedication of the lincoln memorial in the mainstream white newspapers. you will find no reference to that whatsoever. if you read the black newspapers, the baltimore african-american, chicago defender, the atlanta daily world, and especially the pittsburgh courier, it is front page news, because not only has the government enforced segregation offended a flower of black culture in america, it has done so at the contradictory moment of the great emancipator's celebration. that is our day in april of 1922.

across town a man didn't come that day, and daniel knows that man. across town there is a guy named steven wahl. he's been working at the government printing office for all of his career. he's either retired or about to retire. he's lived in washington from the time that it was a haven for black people, to a time when it became completely hostile where they couldn't eat in restaurants, they couldn't stay in hotels, they were driven from government jobs. i can imagine why steven wahl might not have attended the celebration that day, because he's had a builter, a bitter experience. he's been driven up out of his job three times by democratic administrations. so daniel, tell us about steven,

what he might have been thinking that day, and the path it took it to that moment. >> it's very interesting. when steven wahl was living in georgetown in 1922, he was somebody who resembled less the -- or at least tried to resemble lest the people on the platform that day and more like archie bunker. when he was in georgetown, whenever an african-american would move on to his block, he would -- would move to a different neighborhood. he was convinced that property values would go down. he actually had changed his name from steven wahl to steven gates, and he was not at the celebration that day, because he was living very much as a white man. that was a decision that he made. once he retired from the government printing office, that was the last tie he had to

anyone who identified him as an african-american. and when he made that decision to become white, it was a decision that initially was very difficult for him. he had come from a family that had helped build black washington after the civil war. you know, for his family -- when his father first came to washington, d.c., 1867, not only was the lincoln memorial not built, but the washington monument was only half-finished. there is so much that was left to be done in washington. >> as you say, washington was just a muddy, half-made town. >> yes. it was a place where pigs ran in the streets, and maybe pigs still do run in the streets. [ laughter ]

figuratively speaking. and it was a place where there was a tremendous amount of possibility for african-americans. and the wahl family had come to -- stephen wahl's father, o.s.b. wahl. he was a man whose -- that very name walked the line between slave and free. that first name, orendodus, was i mean for lack of a better word, it was a slave's name. it had the kind of latiny grandiosity -- >> slave masters almost always did that, yeah. >> he had been born in the 1820s on a north carolina plantation.

he was the child of a slave owner who never married but had many children with three women whom he owned. >> tell us a little bit about him. >> first name is a slave name. the second name is simon boullivier. unclear how he acquired the name of a latin-american liberator. but his father was someone who -- i mean he was someone who freed his children. he had many children. he freed them all. he sent them to ohio to be raised by radical quaker abolitionists. he knew the abolitionists, and he gave them a lot of money. and they raised his children. >> let me add one parenthetical here. in fact, the black elite of washington of whom i spoke at the outset, many, many, many, many of them, if not the

majority, were mixed-race persons. many, many of them were children and grandchildren of slavemasters and slave women. hence, the look of the near-white black leader at that point. o.s.b. wahl is also one of those people. >> yes. and he winds up in the 1850s, he's raised by these abolitionists and trains to become a shoemaker. he decides to move from a small town outside of cincinnati to overland, ohio, which in the 1850s was the most abolitionist place in america. >> a hotbed, yes. >> a true hotbed. it was a place where the first african-american is elected to political office. his brother-in-law, john mercer langston, and he is -- o.s.b. wahl establishes a reputation

for two things. one for his ardent activism as an anti-slavery political activism, and, second, he gets a reputation for having what one observer called a trumpet-tongued way with words. he was a really great speaker and was actually wickedly funny. in the late 1850s he was actually indicted for violating the fugitive slave act. >> that's a great passage of the book, by the way. great passage. >> because he helps -- he takes part in a vigilante action to free a captive. there had been a fugitive slave who had been captured by kentucky slave catchers, and a group of overland abolitionists surrounded the slave captors and basically freed the man and whisked him off to canada.

and orchlts a.s.b. wahl was among about three dozen men who were indicted. he wound up being freed, however, because the indictment misspelled his first name.indic. he wound up being freed, however, because the indictment misspelled his first name. all through his life people were getting orendodus wrong, and as someone who has the last name sharfstein, i can relate. so when the civil war started, o.s.b. wahl recruited hundreds of troops for the massachusetts 54th and other black regiments, and in the waning days of the war he was commissioned a captain in the union army. he headed to south carolina. he was put up in a confiscated house of a confederate official. and very soon after he arrived

in south carolina, the war ended, and he transferred to the freezeman bureau. freed men's bureau. there was the bureau of refugees and abandoned lands. really it was the first big government agency in american history. >> whose role was to integrate former slaves into society. >> there was the emancipation proclamation and the 13th amendment declared that african-americans were slaves no more and they were free. the big question for everyone is how free is free? what the freed man's bureau tried to do is give meaning to freedom and give meaning to give new meaning to and new meaning what citizenship would mean and new means to what government could do for its citizens. wahl worked in south carolina

for the freed man's bureau. they wound up coming and ran for the territorial legislature in washington. was elected twice from a majority white district. taken way from african-americans and he studied at howard university law school and spent the rest of his life as a lawyer. now, for him, he moved to washington, d.c., and he had his children educated in howard university's lab schools, which were the only integrated schools in washington. and he raised his children. he raised steven wahl, raised steven wahl's brothers and sisters, to expect any kind of -- any right, any opportunity that any other american could expect.

>> another parenthetical. so we have this gentleman, and i have to go back, because you skipped one of my favorite parts. o.s.b. wahl, an abolitionist, they're risking their lives and not to mention their livelihoods to rescue escaped slaves. when these guys back in overland rescue this one slave, they become kind of celebrities. who shows up in jail to visit them? john brown. i mean, a fearsome cat shows up. but back to washington. so o.s.b. wahl comes to washington and starts a political career. he sits in the legislature. he becomes the first black justice of the peace. they call him judge from then on. but then we see -- we see that washington begins to take that inevitable turn toward profound, deep disenfranchisement of blacks and profound segregation.

so what is happening for the wahls, which, you know, an elite family, what's happening to the wahls is that their world is circumscribed to places they cannot go, places they cannot eat. and what you see in the -- during the period of segregation, and some of us were old enough and were born then, is that the black elites entertained in their homes almost exclusively, when they traveled they stayed in the homes of other blacks because they didn't have public accommodations. tell us about the home, the parties of wahls. >> sure. the wahls had a big, beautiful house that was right next to howard university. and it was a place, o.s.b. wahl had went to law school there, had sent his children to the schools that howard ran, he had been asked by general oliver

otis howard, the namesake for howard university, to go to overland and recruit the first graduates for the university. so this was an institution that wahl really took pride in building. and their home was a beautiful house. it was right next door to john mercer langston's humes. >> langston hughes' great-uncle. >> yes. they could look out onto the street and say, that tree was planted by the great abolitionist charles sumner. this tree was a gift from another great abolitionist. so this was an amazing block. and he had -- you know, the people who had come to his home and the spent time with him and with his children were amazing. so there was john mercer

langston, who was the first dean of the howard university law school and later was the first african-american elected to congress from virginia. but he was family. frederick douglas was someone -- >> not bad dinner company. >> frederick douglas was a frequent guest. susan b. anthony and o.s.b. wahl and his wife amanda wahl were not just civil rights activists, but they were really suffrage activists for the vote for women. so in 1870 this was a time when susan b. anthony was arrested for trying to vote in the congressional election. amanda wahl also was marching to the registrar of voters and demanded to be registered to vote.

so susan b. anthony was there, and i think the wahls were embarrassed by one of o.s.b. wahl's sisters who was an opponent for suffrage for women, because she thought it was unfeminine. but o.s.b. wahl, amanda wahl, john mercer langston's wife, carrie wahl langston, they were suffrage activists. >> and when we see -- i importune you to read this, because when we see these dinner gatherings, and just the loomnaloo luminaries of people that were there, we see a galaxy of activists and people that we all know. we see an interracial environment and don't see segregation inside the home. indeed, at one point wahl invites to his home a young man who is a white cousin on the slave side of the family. they have a high time, and the young man writes home that had

never been in a finer home or met finer people. >> and his cousins never forgave him for that. >> right. but we see it. you talk about that. the night at the wahl home on howard hill is a spectacular thing. there's music, conversation, internationally known names, the daytime is different. is it not? >> yes. so when wahl is practicing law, he is basically scraping for clients in the -- in the criminal courts in washington. and, you know, life for -- for any african-american. life for an african-american who had known the kind of power and society that o.s.b. wahl had known was a life of continuing indignity.

so the prosecutor was constantly disparaging his work. the judges were discourteous to him. one thing that was very interesting to see was not only the fact that, you know, i followed him over many decades, and you can see his idealism and his spirit curdling a little bit, and at the same time when he's in court and people attack him and attack his character, he is constantly defending himself in very strong terms, and, also, in -- with some very strong actions. people say things that suggest he is a dishonorable person, and whether they were white, whether they were black, he would

slap them across the face. >> i have a personal story that in my family, i was telling daniel before we came on, during the dna phase, i had my dna taken to do the test. my family, of course, carries a very strong tradition, so i knew in fact, that my great-great-grandfathers on both sides were white. slavemaster, who had their way with enslaved women. so i got my dna back, and i'm only half sub issahara african. which is about right in that. so what you see here -- the one thing that you want to see here, people like wahl. many of whom were half-white or even more, sometimes some were three-quarters. some were barely discernibly black when you had the tutored eye.