Juanita Wagner

Juanita Wagner was born in Danville, Iowa, where her parents Elmer Chester Wagner (23 November 1897 - 5 November 1932) and Ann (Annie) Mary Wagner-Dunn (1 October 1896 - 17 July 1967) owned a farm.^[1] When she was three years old, her father died. Her mother was on her own from then on, but found work as a teacher. Juanita and her older sister Betty Ann Wagner (27 September 1925 - 15 August 2015) helped their mother on the farm.^[2]

In the school year 1939-'40, their teacher Birdie Mathews took the initiative to have her pupils correspond with schoolchildren abroad. She had made several trips around Europe and also visited the Netherlands. There she probably met Martha von der Möhlen, who was an English teacher at the Municipal Lyceum for Girls in Amsterdam.^[3] After returning to America, she started a 'programme of international correspondence'. From Europe, she had brought a list with names of schoolchildren who wanted to correspond. Juanita is said to have chosen Anne Frank's name from this list.^[4] Since only Margot Frank received English lessons from Miss Von der Möhlen, it is also plausible that Betty Ann and Margot were first paired together and, as a result, so were their younger sisters. In the letter Margot send back to Betty Ann, she thanked Juanita for het letter and wrote that not she, but Anne would answer it.^[5]

In early 1940, Juanita and Betty Ann sent their first letters to Anne and Margot. The original letters from the Wagner sisters have not been preserved, but Betty Ann remembered Juanita writing about her family and her life on the farm. She also asked them to look up Danville on a map, hinting to look near Burlington and the Mississippi River.^[6]

Anne replied on 29 April 1940: "I did receive your letter and want to answer you as quick as possible." She wrote about her parents and school, and about her picture collection. She asked Juanita to send pictures of her and her sister. Furthermore, she wrote that she had asked her friend Sanne Ledermann if: "[...] she would like to communicate with one of your friends. She wants to do it with a girl about my age not with a boy."^[7] She added Sanne's address at the bottom of the letter. Anne was not yet taught English at the Sixth Montessori School. She probably wrote her letter in Dutch first, after which either Margot or her father Otto Frank helped with the translation.^[8]

When Juanita received Anne's letter in early May 1940, she wrote back immediately. On 10 May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. That Anne and Margot were German-Jewish refugees was not known to the Wagner sisters in Danville. They no longer received replies to their letters and they worried about how their pen pals fared during the war. After the war, Juanitas sister tried to contact their Dutch pen pals again. She received a response from Otto Frank explaining that his family had had to go into hiding and that his wife and daughters had died in a concentration camp.^[9]

During the war, Juanita's family moved several times in search for work. First to nearby Burlington, to return here after a short stay in Denver, Colorado. At the end of the war in the summer of 1945, Juanitas mother and sister moved to Rock Island, Illinois. She herself continued to live in Burlington, completing her high school. She also had a job there as a waitress.^[10]

Juanita moved with her mother and sister to Sierra Madre, California, in the late 1940s. There, on 9 December 1949, she married Thurman Gerold Bender, with whom she had two sons. After their divorce, she remarried and moved to Redlands, California.^[11]

Source personal data.^[12] Address: Danville, Iowa, USA.