Bernhard Paul "Buddy" Elias was a Swiss actor and president of the Anne Frank Fonds, the foundation dedicated to preserving the memory of his cousin Anne Frank.
Biography
Elias was born in Frankfurt am Main in Germany in 1925. His mother Helene was Otto Frank’s youngest sister and Anne’s aunt. His father, Erich Elias, became head of the Basel-based Opekta company in 1929 and Bernhard moved there in 1931. The Elias family lived in Basel in Gundeldingerstrasse, near the Margarethen ice rink. This was also where Buddy and his older brother Stephan attended primary school. The Frank family was always very close. Otto Frank regularly came to Basel to see his sister and brother-in-law, and always took Margot and Anne with him. The cousins also met in the summer holidays on occasional visits to another relative called Olga Spitzer, who lived in Sils Maria in the canton of Grisons. Buddy got on well with his cousins, particularly with Anne, who was four years younger than him. They were both passionate about ice-skating. In 1947 he joined Holiday on Ice and was with them for over ten years and later acted on stage in Switzerland, Great Britain, France, and Germany. In the mid-1970s, he appeared increasingly in film and television, mainly in Holocaust-themed productions. His mother was Helene Frank, Anne Frank's paternal aunt. Elias was the first cousin and last-surviving close relative of Holocaust diarist Anne Frank, who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March 1945. In 1986, Buddy was elected as a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel. In 1996, he was made honorary President of the foundation. Until his death in 2015, he tirelessly dedicated himself to the legacy of Anne and Otto Frank, using education to stand up against anti-Semitism and discrimination. Like his Uncle Otto, he saw Anne Frank’s text as a contemporary document for peace work and dialogue between people. The Anne Frank Fonds is responsible for the rights of Franks' Diary of a Young Girl, which until his death in 1980 had been headed by her father, Otto Frank. As president of the Fonds, Buddy Elias decided to bring together the estates of the Frank-Elias family in the Jewish Museum Frankfurt. Elias lived in Basel with his wife, Gerti Elias, where he died on 16 March 2015. The couple had two sons, Patrick and Oliver, who became actors.
