At 12 she’s become obsessed with the Holocaust,

with the thought of children her age

who in the soft evening did not

go to bed tucked in with pleasant dreams

and fluffy play animals at their feet.

She knows about the children

bathed in seething gas and

turned to ash and cinder.

 

Her dreaming eye sees Anne Frank:

stuffed into tight attics,

hiding under tables,

herded into cattle cars,

separated from her family,

reduced to skin and bones,

ravaged by typhus,

freezing to death,

her small body unceremoniously dumped

into a mass grave,

and an indelible yellow star

stitched through her heart.

 

 

Stephen Cipot

Garden City Park

 

Author’s note: We of course know the story of Anne Frank and her small family as a tragic outcome of the Holocaust.  What many do not know is that Anne’s story is tied to our story.

Had Otto Frank been granted permission for his family to emigrate to the U.S., Anne may still be alive and well living in the U.S., having grown up a typical little girl in an educated family, who would be, perhaps, unknown and able to develop as our children are so fortunately able to grow up and develop, free and unmolested.

Anne’s father tried to emigrate with his family to the U.S., but his entireties and applications were lost, not processed, or destroyed when Germany invaded the Netherlands.

Otto had moved his family from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933.  Hoping to escape the horrors and violence of Nazi Germany’s oppression of Jews, Otto applied to emigrate to the U.S. when Germany invaded Amsterdam in 1940.

The Franks then went into hiding officially stateless.  Two years later they were turned in by an informer and arrested by the Gestapo in August 1944, and transported to processing and concentration camps.

In November 1944, Anne and her sister, Margot, were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (likely of typhus) a few months later.  The arresting Nazi officer subsequently lived as a pensioner in Vienna until he died of old age in 1972.  Otto Frank, who survived, subsequently said that the officer simply did what he was ordered to do.

Until the outbreak of WWII, about 50% of U.S. citizens had a favorable opinion of Hitler and Nazi Germany, antisemitism coursed through society and the State Department.  The U.S. fan base was led by prominent famous people, like the outspoken fawning rants of the charismatic aviator Charles Lindberg, as well as influential captains of industry such as Henry Ford, who had Hitler’s Mein Kompf translated into English and published in the U.S..  Hitler’s U.S. fans visited Germany before WWII and praised Nazi handiwork.

Germany was held up as a model for organizing society.  In fact, president F.D.R. believed Lindberg to be a Nazi agent, among many others.

The passing of successions of German laws that stripped Jews of their citizenship and property and the rampant violence against Jews that occurred in earnest in the mid-1930s should have been disturbing and warning enough.

Oppression continued to progress with Crystal Night (1938), and the mandatory segregation and the death camps.  It took the bombing of Pearl Harbor by a country aligned with Germany for the evil reality of the Nazis to sink in—Hitler sought to erase Jews from the face of the earth and made no secret of it.

As it is, children in the U.S. learn about Anne Frank and the Holocaust around age 12 through Anne’s personal diary, but things could have been very different.

“Joanna” featured in Yeshiva Universities “PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators” edited by Dr. Karen Shawn.  Visit:  www.yu.edu/fish-center/publications

Each issue examines a specific topic through a variety of lenses, including education, history, literature, poetry, psychology and art.  Experts from high schools, colleges, universities, museums and resource centers from around the world bring diverse perspectives highlighting particular facets of the issue at hand. To obtain a hard copy of the journal, e-mail [email protected]

The touching portrait of Anne Frank was painted by my friend, Dr. Francine Mayran, psychiatrist, artist, educator, expert at the Council of Europe on the Holocaust and genocide.

Visit: FMayran.com (click the little English flag in the upper corner)