Jewish-American Author Anne Frank to Release Memoirs

Wouldn’t that have made a simply beautiful headline? Imagine a world where Anne Frank hadn’t been killed at 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but had actually been renationalised into another country and allowed to continue her life, and her writing, unpersecuted.

Because we know now of course that Anne Frank and millions of other Jews were persecuted. They weren’t the dirty, filthy rats bent on greed and destruction that the National Socialist Party, and in turn the German people, and the people of the world made them out to be. They were an entire section of society systematically destroyed for their beliefs.

Read a review of A Diary of a Young Girl

It’s stories like The Diary of a Young Girl that teach us the human aspect of history, after all she was just an ordinary girl caught up in an extraordinary situation, and we must learn from history, we must. This year we learned Otto Frank twice attempted to get his family out of Germany. A Reuters report shows us that from April to December 1941, Otto tried desperately to get his family into America and was denied entry. It’s little wonder really, statistics from 1940 show us that most American residents didn’t feel safe or comfortable taking in Jewish refugees, the propaganda really did its job well.

Of course had the family gone, it would be a different story today and an almost 77-year-old Anne Frank would have almost certainly been one of America’s greatest achievements. Anne was German until 1941, after this her nationality was removed by the Nazis and she became stateless. I can’t imagine the horror of my country of birth deciding it didn’t want me any more, leaving me nowhere to go. Had the Franks got to America, Anne would have certainly considered herself an American Jew and we could well be celebrating the release of her memoirs right now.

So when we read A Diary of a Young Girl, and our children read it as required school reading, we must not just learn about the past but we must let it teach us now and for our future. The anti-Islamic sentiment I am seeing this week sends echoes of 1940 through my consciousness. We must not allow ourselves to dehumanise a whole group of people based on their beliefs, because when we do we lose our own humanity. By not taking Anne Frank and her family, America inadvertently sentenced her to death; America weren’t the only ones, fear and panic made many countries close their doors. However, Anne and her family are a single famous statistic in a very long game. During 1940 it is thought that German Nazis killed as many as 12,000 Jews a day, and despite reading many, many books on the subject I have never understood how the world stood by and allowed that to happen. Sadly life is now showing me in glorious Technicolor how you learn to hate an entire group of people.

We cannot change Anne’s story, but we can learn from it. To beat evil we must retain our humanity, if we choose any other course of action, we are not beating it, we are joining it. Be beautiful people!