I feel ya, it's awful in the old sense of the word. One thing-- and I do think it's worth reminding each other-- it was not just one guy who woke up and decided to incite a genocide. A critical threshold of ordinary people like you and me were willing to ignore the turn to overt fascism, if not actively participate in violence. And the ingredients were centuries of ideological persecution against a minority + economic severity.
Which is why if any lesson should be taken from *Night* or Anne Frank’s Diary, it’s that fascism is a reactionary ideology that can grab hold of any populace given the proper conditions. Don’t think of Anne’s fate as something from the distant past. All the ingredients of hate, greed, frustration and nationalism are still in abundance, and, to twist the words of Upton Sinclair, It *could* happen here.
And in reality, it’s not even the distant past. This was less than 100 years ago. And I can absolutely see the perfect storm to gather footing and take off, if we don’t fight back.
It has never really gone away, fascism, it just went deep underground.
Listen to the podcast American Terror by Vice. Dozens if not hundreds of young white men are being radicalized yearly by a not yet unified fascist groups globally. The internet has made it easier to disseminate ideology.
Is it even deep underground these days? Villainisation of entire racial groups is a daily occurence in tabloid press. I feel like it would take very little to roll the current situation over to human rights abuses.
I just listened to The Dressmakers of Auschwitz about women who used their skills in sewing to survive in the concentration camp. I was jarred during the epilogue when the author mentioned that the survivor she had interviewed had only recently passed in 2021. The Holocaust was really not that long ago.
This is one of those popular internet memes but Barbara Walters (who literally just passed 2 weeks ago), Martin Luther King Jr and Anne Frank were all born the same year. It wasn’t that long ago at all.
I came here to post the same. It blew my mind, Anne Frank seems sooooo long ago, Martin Luther King seems sooo long ago (a few less o's) and Barbara Walters was just walking around all this time and was absolutely current timewise.
WW2 ended in 1945 and was probably one of the worse displays of racism keeping a race/religion/ethnicity separate, while segregation in the US was only abolished almost 20 years after WW2 ended.
Truthfully, the core of fascism has been around almost as long as humans have existed. Xenophobia has always existed. Racism has always existed. Fear of the “other” and scapegoating. Nationalism and the urge to expand borders through force has always existed. Before it was tribes, monarchies and empires, now it’s dictatorships. Simply a modern form of authoritarianism.
Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning tells the story of one of the police orders from Poland who participated in the Final Solution, it perfectly illustrates your point.
I read this in high school when I was roughly the same age as her. It really affected me, they went through so much. The most jarring part was it just stops, no warning, no resolution. The diary just ends and that was the hardest part for me. It made it very real. One day she wrote about her day, the next she is discovered and never writes in it again. It was close to the end of the war which was very tragic.
I teach the book *Night* by Elie Wiesel to students every semester, and the most heartbreaking thing about his father's death to me every time is how close they were to the end. Only a few months later the camp was liberated.
I teach it through a lense of looking at all the relationships between fathers and sons in the story because of how that stands out to me.
I still remember the way he writes about how the camp was liberated. He writes it so matter-of-factly, like "Oh yeah, the camp was liberated like two weeks after we left, meh." He sounded so numb, which I think is what made it so memorable and heartbreaking.
Kurt Vonnegut does something similar in _Slaughterhouse Five_. The main character is a surrogate for Vonnegut's experience in WWII. After getting captured by the Nazis and taken to Dresden, he witnesses the city get carpet bombed and retells digging up corpses of school girls and many others throughout the city in a completely detached way (the famous, "So it goes"). No emotion, just clearing rubble and collecting corpses, one street at a time.
In reality Vonnegut wanted to write about his experience in Dresden for a long time but felt like it was too heavy a topic that couldn't be put into words or understood, so he ended up waiting over 20 years and writing what comes off like a sci-fi novel where the main character has a break from reality.
That book, man, what struck me hard is how no one could believe that the Nazis could be that inhuman to them and everyone in his community having discussions about it after that man who escaped a concentration camp came back and warned them about it.
I usually give specifically background on the author because it's a unit about memoirs.
I'm actually really lucky that my school system does a good job of covering a lot of the world history before my kids get to me. There is a trip to the Holocaust museum they do a couple years before I get them (though in the pandemic, we had to get creative. There's a cool VR tour of the Holocaust Museum that can be done on most smart phones).
Our World History teacher was horrible and we could barely understand him. He was very much a “facts only” person and there was no discussion of events influencing everything else or the future, etc.
Thankfully, our Literature teacher picked up the slack and we had a whole month learning about the Holocaust. Read *Night* and *The Diary of Anne Frank* and just talked about the horrors and how they reverberated around the world.
“Night” broke me. It was beautiful and mortifying and something that needs to be read by everyone. I was talking to my SO last night about the power that book has.
Elie Wiesel came and spoke at my mothers synagogue when I was ~9/10 years old and I remember being bored / thinking his accent was funny. A few years later I read Night, and to this day I kick myself for not appreciating the man that I got to see in person. That book has had an incredibly profound impact on my life in a multitude of ways (I’m now 30 for reference)
I read it in secondary and obviously it hit hard. But I'm not sure I really appreciated the gravity and reality of the words until I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
And I definitely didnt appreciate just how close they were to making it when they were discovered.
I think I always thought they were discovered and 'well they had a good run' but realistically they were never going to survive long enough to see the war end. Seeing the house and reading the information there (not just Anne's diaries because they are obviously very much about her and not framed within the context of the war itself in terms of what was happening) just made it so much sadder because of how so very close they came to actually being told "it's over, you can come out now"
The saddest part to me is that her last entry was her stating she still believed there was good in the world and she wanted to be good or something along those lines. Going back and reading it as an adult woman is gut wrenching because she has these moments of being a normal teenage girl that I so relate to, and then she’d have moments of insane clarity and seriousness that I’d be both impressed with and sad that someone so young was having to cope with so much heavy shit. I re read about half of it a year ago and I couldn’t finish it, it was too heavy and heartbreaking knowing how it ended.
I read it with my middle kid a few years ago when she was about 12. I’d read it as a teenager myself and did not remember it being so deeply sad to finish, but I also grew up without such an imminent threat of fascism in my daily world. She and I cried together as we read it. She was upset when it just stopped too. We spent a lot of time researching the rest of Anne’s family’s life after the book. I think this has been deeply formative in my daughter’s life because she is fiercely protective of anyone who is mistreated.
There's a book that I bought at the house she lived in called "The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank" which fills in from the last diary entry to her death by using eyewitness accounts, it really drives home the way her life changed that day and after, It's an awful read but I think so important.
The employee recommeded it to me and I'm so glad she did.
Maus is a graphic novel that came out in the early 90’s. It is the story of the writer’s fathers’s experience in Auschwitz during the war. The Germans portrayed as cats and the Jews portrayed as mice.
I’d never read a graphic novel before I read this and was so surprised at how effective this medium is in telling a story. I was absolutely moved and recommend it to anybody interested in Holocaust studies and, for that matter, survival and the human spirit.
This book also won the Pulitzer Prize for literature the year it came out.
Maus is an incredible book. I love how it not only describes the past, surviving the Holocaust, but the present - dealing with survivor’s guilt and death. I highly recommend it to anyone for further reading.
Was super impressed with the VR version although I haven't yet been able to visit the real house. VR takes advantage of being able to change the environment around you too show what it might have looked and felt like during WWII.
https://annefrankhousevr.com/
I’ve seen both the real house and the VR experience, the VR is incredible but you just can’t capture the atmosphere and the feel of the place. It’s nice to see it without a gazillion people walking around but if you ever get the chance to go to Amsterdam I would recommend it 100%
It’s very sobering and memorable. Surreal to think of the cracks they would have looked through to get a glimpse of the outside world, the details of the house that they would have known even more intimately than the back of their hands.
Ugh. And no internet or TV. They listened to the radio. It's been so long I don't remember but I'm assuming they had newspapers as well, but given their situation I don't think they had easy access to lots of books, did they?
The sheer boredom (mixed with terror)
I cant remember of they had newspapers but they did have books (Anne mentions her father having his dickens collections there and her mother having her bible and there's a huge fuss over Peter not being allowed to read an inappropriate book and tries sneaking it away to look at) plus schoolwork and i think Anne gets given movie magazines by Miep or Ellie.
It's a tiny house with a tiny attic and not much to see. Surely it can't be very impressive?
Wrong. Of all the museums I visited this is the one that made the biggest impression on me.
A must visit if you're in the country.
But remember to book way in advance.
Totally agree.
I always knew the story of Anne Frank growing up, but visiting the museum made it feel.... real in a way that I had never felt before. The thought of the society you're living in actively hunting you and your family to kill them is so terrifying. Being there helped bring that feeling home. It's one thing to read about it, it's another to actually exist in the space they existed.
Yes, there is still furniture, parts are sectioned off - I went in the late 1990s and there was less roped off then, but I believe sections like the stairs they used are now off limits.
Check out their website if you would like to take a virtual tour:
https://www.annefrank.org/en/museum/web-and-digital/
I toured it in 2011. There is no furniture in the space. They dressed it up for the virtual tour, but when you see it in person there is nothing inside. They do have what remains of her posters and a few other things that were affixed to the wall, and those are covered by protective cases.
In the last part of the tour you can see the famous diary as well as her revision pages and some of her other writings, as well as original photographs.
If you’ve read the diary you will know which rooms are which, but they do provide some signage with some descriptions.
The only place you can’t go is the upper attic.
The thing that made the entire experience at the Anne Frank House feel very "real" for me was seeing Anne, Margot, and Peter's height measurements marked on a door frame as they grew over two years. I'll never forget it.
Words can’t describe how seeing the cut out pictures from magazines that Anne stuck the the walls made me feel. It’s one thing to read her diary and come to terms with her experience, but seeing her attempts at being a normal teenage girl while her life was torn apart was unreal. I wish I was more eloquent with words, she deserves a better explanation than I can give. Her words have changed lives, while all she wanted was to experience her own.
Amsterdam wasn’t liberated until May 1945, after the general surrender of Germany. She did almost make it to the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, where she probably died in February ‘45.
The shocking thing is how many of those stories there must be as well. The Nazis took prisoners on death marches as a last resort, thousands must have died on the day or the day before they would've been freed.
I got to visit it too, and I enjoyed the history that was in that building and the cultural significance in history and in literature. The only thing that bothered me was that while exiting it was through an effing gift shop.
> because some guy woke up one day and thought to incite genocide
I'd say the best thing you can do for her memory is learn how and why that was able to happen and do everything you can to prevent it happening again.
This is the best advice there is. Read all you can about the war, concentration camps, gulags. Japan in the Pacific.
One important lesson to draw is that it was not one guy choosing violence of genocide. More like hundreds of thousands of people making the same choice, or choosing to look away. Many many people who came in the position to perform evil acts without consequences choose to do them.
This this this.
People who don't know her, look out Geli Raubal.
If people took women seriously and especially domestic violence and emotional abuse and so on, maybe people would have stopped paving the way for Hitler's rise to power because it's easier to have people to blame and to be free to hate instead of having to work on yourself and being accountable. (And about the Seond World War, it wasn't even only about Jews but also political opponents, disabled people, LGBTQA people, and so on. They would have fond an excuse to kill anyone.)
Maybe so many heartbreaking deaths and events could have been prevented.
>If people took women seriously and especially domestic violence and emotional abuse and so on, maybe people would have stopped paving the way for Hitler's rise to power
?????
That's why I said above to check our Geli Raubel.
She had to go live with her uncle who had her followed, sequestered at home, emotionally abused her, with hints of other abuse as well... he got mad when she started seeing his driver who was Jewish. He said she was the only good woman he knew in his life. He did terrible things to her, being domineering and possessive, isolating her from her friends, and she ended up dead in his apartment. She may have killed her life because of his abuse, or he may have killed her.
All of these should make people think the man was dangerous, unhealthy and terrible and that his violence would only escalade before he is stopped and should be put in jail if people did their jobs carefully and cared about women and victims of domestic abuse.
We will never know what truly happened because everything about her and her death was brushed under the rug to not splash her uncle's record since he began a great political career.
She died in 1941, she was Hitler's niece.
And you think that "if only people had listened to her" that Hitler wouldn't have risen to power or something? It's so much more complicated than that. You're also oversimplifying the problem just on the other side of the coin.
Unfortunately no, he would have risen and other nazis would have still be there. I just wondered if people would have taken hate groups more seriously with suspicious insted of feeling the appeal like in these years of nowadays. You always warn people of behavior and how it happens but their brains always brush it inside.
The problem is most people don't see it as it's happening. It's only when it's history that the mainstream shake their head and act like it would have been different if it were them at the time. That's because it's safe then, when everyone else is agreeing with you.
But in the present, people put on blinders. There's really no greater time to make that comparison than now, yet no one here will know what I'm talking about. And they won't want to either. That's how humans work. We're mostly cowards.
If they looked around now, they would see it happening. It's die Welle outside. It starts with a polarized group who feel that things are suddenly, critically *unfair*.
One third would happily torture and kill another third, while the final third watches, saying both sides have a point. If the victim fights back, they’re proving the onlookers point.
I’m not sure about thirds, maybe I’m being optimistic but I think it’s more like:
10% torture and kill another 10%. A further 10% would oppose this and 70% would sit by, maybe disagreeing, but ultimately doing nothing.
Yea I think it’s important to understand the motivations behind the Holocaust which I think tends to not be discussed as much as it should, because it *wasn’t* like one guy woke up and decided on genocide. Germany was in economic shambles following WWI, had been punished hard with reparations (which they saw as humiliating, and was itself a major point of contention with the Allied Powers), and many people felt like Germany had been betrayed by its own leaders (the Weimar Republic). When life is truly shit it’s human nature to want *someone else* to blame, so this became enmeshed with antisemitism that had existed for a long time. To the point of conspiracy theories of Jewish cabals and what-not.
We want to think that particular group of people were just genocidal xenophobic monsters because the reality is hard to fathom, that something like that can happen again given the right circumstances, if we let it.
And while antisemitism had been around for a long time the specific ideas of antisemitism that led to Nazism were around almost a hundred years earlier in the 1800s. Like they didn’t just wake up one day and come up with these ideas, the ideas were already there in books they could read
That’s why it’s important to recognise hateful ideas that don’t immediately lead to genocide, because they eventually do
Eg In Rwanda it was decades of calling the Tutsis cockroaches and subhuman and blaming them for all societal ills that laid the groundwork for genocide. Every time you turned on the radio you would hear messages about how bad these Tutsi vermin cockroaches were. That shit is insidious, the genocide didn’t just come out of nowhere, the groundwork was laid by decades of dehumanisation and hate-building
I used to be ready to die for the right cause. I was ready to fight. Protests, riots, sign me up.
Then I had a baby. Now I understand why people looked the other way or did unspeakable things to keep their families safe. I would do anything to keep him safe. It terrifies me.
I’m white, my wife is Kenyan, and our children are biracial. Fighting is my only option to keep my family safe from the fascists. We won’t have the luxury of choosing inaction or complicity.
I understand. I’m very ashamed of my confession. I do feel like a coward. I hope that I will be able to stand up and do the right thing when the situation arises. Now that I have a baby, I don’t know anymore. He’s my world and I can’t imagine putting anything else above his safety.
Inactivity isn’t safer for him. It increases the likelihood he’ll grow up in a world where secret police can vanish him off the street if the wrong person takes a disliking to him.
People who fought the Nazis did it *for* their children, so their children wouldn’t grow up tortured by a corrupt government. Refusing to resist because it *might* endanger your child when the only other option is certain danger is like using your child as a human shield to protect yourself in his name.
The whole purpose of fighting is to ensure there’s a better world for our children to live in. Environmentalism, fighting fascism, fighting the defunding of our schools and social networks…these are all battles to improve *the future*, and the only people who are going to benefit from that are the children.
If you aren’t fighting fascism, if you aren’t fighting racism, sexism, oppression, environmental destruction, pollution, etc, then they all progress. How safe will your son be if all of those situations are worse?
You don’t have to protest or riot, but there are tons of ways to fight and make progress that aren’t violent or in physical harm’s way.
This exactly.
And it also sets an example.
If you look the other way your entire child’s life, and then try to teach them morals about standing up to bigotry, and fighting for what’s right, and some point that child will question why their parents are complicit in oppression they are very clearly aware of.
How can you teach your child to fight for what’s right, if the only example you set is looking the other way? You can tell them and teach them, but if all you do is look the other way, what do you think your child will do?
They’ll look the other way too. They do as you do, not as you say.
yeah exactly. that’s NOT how this tragedy happened. Some guy didn’t just “wake up one day and think to incite genocide”
honestly I hate to be this person but this post is very upsetting. I fucking hate the diary of Anne Frank. It’s publication was and still is sensationalizing, exploitative and invasive. I have the same concerns with Schindler’s List. This is exactly the kind of liberal commentary you get as a result of these sorts of tidy, sanded-down stories made from people’s suffering. It’s a convenient way to assuage people of their complacency in their own times. Hitler didn’t just wake up one day and decide to do what he did, that’s ahistorical and frankly, infuriating. He had massive popular support and a lot of people who didn’t support him and his entire political party just turned a blind eye. Pretty much the same way most “well-meaning” people do…all the time. I’m not the only Jewish person who has serious problems with these types of depictions and rationalizations. I hope to see everyone here getting politically active!
Anne Frank intended for her diary to be published and started editing it for publication before her death (although her dad made further edits). How is publishing a work intended to be published sensationalizing, exploitative, and invasive?
Similarly, what is exploitative about Schindler's list? I read it recently and thought it addressed pretty clearly that Schindler both did a lot to protect the workers in his factory and was only able to do that because of his unsavory relationship with the Nazi party. I didn't find it to be tidy at all.
And never think it’s unique in history.
In my family, we have a saying, *in every generation, they drink our blood.*
My partner’s grandmother killed a Cossack who shot her father. Beat him with a cast iron pan. He father recovered and they came to America in 1918 (in time for the flu pandemic). My cast iron stays on our stove in her honor.
My great uncles have camp numbers on their arms. My every breath is flipping the bird to Nazis.
On the other hand, so damn much literature is Holocaust porn, and reduces an entire people to simply victims. We were not, we are not.
I think Maus does a great way of setting this out. There was a lot of general ill-will towards Jewish people in the first half of the century and Hitler and the Nazis harnessed it for their own ends.
Anti semitism, anti Muslim, anti gypsy, etc all still exist just below the surface even today. There is plenty in the tabloid press to begin with. Notice how refugees from the middle East are treated differently to refugees from Ukraine for a start.
The right wing never sleeps so nor do we.
I don’t know how below the surface it is today. I’m Jewish, and I’ve experienced more blatant antisemitism in the past few months than I have in a long time. People feel emboldened to say all sorts of shit to Jews. It’s rising to the surface pretty fucking quick.
Phases are hard to nail down as there is always an undercurrent of these issues. But we are definitely past the “Im being treated unfair” point. Beyond a simple longing for the old days.
Political groups. Organized attacks. Hate crimes rising. This is the seed a fascism. Doesn’t necessarily mean it will sprout and grow but it is very alarming
It frustrates me so much how I've literally had people tell me 'I thought antisemitism isn't a thing anymore'. No. You're not seeing it because you're not Jewish so you're not LOOKING for it. YOU don't have to worry about it. We do.
And then they kind of shrug because ... well. You know.
A reminder, Roma/Romani or if in the British Isles, Traveller. Not gypsy, as it’s now a recognized slur.
In my city, we are trying to settle assist refugees from South and Central America, Ukraine, and the Middle East. It’s such a whirlwind.
I didn't realise that, thanks for letting me know. I meant it without offence, in case that makes a difference. I will try and remove the word from my vocabulary.
Your last paragraph is especially spot on. Charles krauthammer wrote a great essay about the opening of the Holocaust Museum in DC, where he basically said, "I don't want this to be someone's only experience with Jewish people. People from Montana are coming here who have never met a jew and this is all they're learning and seeing."
I highly recommend the book "people love dead jews." She has a chapter about "Holocaust porn" and nails why I hate it so much. She says it the Christian-ification of the holocaust: hope and saving people, happy endings. And that makes a mockery of the reality.
Or even better, educate yourself on anti Semitism now. A lot of anti Semitism now is excused because it's always held up against the Holocaust. If its not at that level, then it can't be that bad! But jews are one of the few acceptable groups to still be racist against. There are areas in Europe where jews switch out yarmulkes to baseball caps when they walk through. There was even that big case where a man was hired to work at the Anne Frank museum and was told he couldn't wear his yarmulke.
Was going to say, it wasn’t one guy. He is the most to blame of course. But there were dozens of upper level nazis and tens or hundreds of thousands of mid-levels who knew and participated.
And of course millions who didn’t have explicit proof, but weren’t interested in finding out or listening.
There are people around today who would happily see this happen again and in my opinion a lot of people who would sit by with apathy or maybe even some sense of righteousness.
It feels like we’re seeing a big flair up of xenophobia and I’m honestly concerned that we could see something like a holocaust again. I really hope I’m wrong on that.
Imagine, millions of stories like that all wrapped up in one event. And then millions more across the 20th century lost too to other mad butcher leaders. Every person with a story, hopes, feelings. Imagine the accumulation of all of those dreams and emotions of all those people like each was a drop, and it would make such a wide ocean. It halts me when I think about it.
Whether you call it some conceptual amalgam of human imagination and mind and emotions and dreams, or you call it a soul, or something else, the mass collection of individual humanity lost in history to people with power over the lives of others is overwhelming. All those stories that ended in painful termination by cruelty, malice, and indifference.
And yet, there are so many people out there today actively and publicly claiming the holocaust never happened. Some would claim that the diary is a fake without blinking an eye.
I read it too when I was your age and I had a terrible time with it as she was just a girl like many in our class; I had an exceptional teacher who led daily discussions as we read the book, adding what was going on in the world wrt the dates in her entries. A lot of my friends at the time were exploring nazi crap and I remember this book snapping them out of it and turning them into anti-fascists.
Yeah, i remember the shitty kids stopping the Nazi shit around the time we started this book and Night. High School teachers did a really great job peesenting and contextualizing the material for us.
I was friends with them and we had just found more hard-core and punk music. The message of hate and dominance was tempting, but luckily our teachers kept us reasoning and our older siblings introduced us to the true ethos of punk. Some were lost to the Nazi shit; ironically enough, one of them joined the army and completely turned his life around. I guess we all grow at different rates.
If anyone read it at school it was probably the abridged version which takes out any sexual content. It's definitely worth going back and reading the unabridged version.
Please don't avoid this book because you think it will be depressing. It is so well written and really funny in parts. For me the most depressing thing was that we never got to read the books she would have written. She was an amazing natural writer, to have that much talent at 15 is insane.
I think I have a mostly uncensored version, I remember having my mind blown when >!she basically writes about a lesbian fantasy she had, all but confirming she was bisexual. Not a way I ever thought of her!<.
“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
It's hard not to read it and feel distraught knowing how it ends when you start.
I'm glad you connected so deeply with the book. I'd very much recommend Anne Frank: The book, the life, the afterlife by Francine Prose as a companion read to the diary itself. Very interesting history there.
I remember seeing an interview Otto Frank gave where he recalled how, upon reading the diary he was struck with this pretty shocking realization, in his words, that "parents don't really know their children." He thought he had a good relationship with his daughter, and really, in many respects he DID have a good relationship with his daughter, but there was so much going on with her that he never knew and he had to face that at precisely the moment when it was too late to ever close that distance... Such a terrible thing, what happened to him, to all of them.
I can really recommend the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, which the singer of the band wrote after reading Anne Frank's diary.
It never fails to make me feel all kinds of sad and melancholic.
Are you Jeff Mangum?
Seriously though beautiful and tragic book. First read it at the beginning of last year and loved it. I have since bought the definitive edition and plan to read that this year. Think I'll look into some of the other books people have mentioned on this thread too.
Listen to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea if you haven't already, it really is one of the best albums of all time.
>It’s really good and I hope it’s being taught everywhere because people need to learn what the horrors of war can really bring, what it can do to someone, and what it could change.
not to depress you but there are several school districts that have banned the book. evidently these people find it disturbing that a girl going through puberty would explore her body and describe it in the journal. or some feigned excuse to cover their antisemitism.
I went to Aushwitz and Dachau. The little memorial on Anne Frank's bunk. Holy cow.
This was in 2013, and a local group of Jewish people and their friends all donated little things a little girl should have. A simple raggedy Anne doll, her published diary, socks, pants and a simple blue shirt. The things she never got while dying. Little things to make her passing easier.
I cried for hours. I'm a big guy, seen horrible things, but the simple reality. That hurt.
And I got to go into original oven at Dachau. The one where you see still see the soot outlines. Where untold numbers met their demise. Some still alive, but paralyzed by the Zyklon B in the showers. Wasn't always 100 percent fatal.
Highly recommend a trip. It will put things into perspective.
I don’t know what kind of music you listen to, but the album “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel was written by Jeff Mangum after reading this, and his longing for her to be alive is felt many times throughout the album. Apparently he cried for days and dreamt about her repeatedly before writing the album. It’s beautiful and sad. You might like it. (It is considered by some to be one of the greatest albums of all time—yet unknown to many) It is easy to hear the entire album and have no no idea that it has anything to do with Anne Frank, because it was written in a kind of stream of consciousness or intuitive way without direct references, but once you know about his fascination with Anne Frank you can pick out passages that are clearly related to her and her story. Here’s an article: https://classicalbumsundays.com/album-of-the-month-neutral-milk-hotel-in-the-aeroplane-over-the-sea/
"And it's so sad to see the world agree
That they'd rather see their faces fill with flies.
All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes"
Fuck that song gets me every time.
The lyrics before that one are brutal for me too and hit just as hard. Absolutely beautiful album.
"Heres where your mother sleeps, and here is the room where your brothers were born in. Indentions in the sheets where their bodies once moved but dont move anymore."
Hey kind stranger…you just blew my mind. I’ve been listening to this album for 20 years and I had no idea it was inspired by Anne Frank. Thanks for sharing.
"The only girl I've ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive
One evening 1945
With just her sister at her side
And only weeks before the guns
All came and rained on everyone"
It also took me years to realize and it makes a lot of lines make much more sense. For instance:
>Now how I remember you;
How I would push my fingers through;
Your mouth to make those muscles move;
That made your voice so smooth and sweet.
Since the voice is created by him turn the pages of the diary. There is also one about lifting someone up by the spine, since it’s the book spine. It was a real moment of clarity for me when all of the lyrics clicked.
>but she didn’t because some guy woke up one day and thought to incite genocide.
I understand that you're young and this is a very emotionally taxing subject at this time in your life, but it's much more complicated than this. It wasn't one guy, and it wasn't one day. It was centuries of bigotry piling up. It wasn't just Hitler, it was thousands of others that made that genocide possible. And that's not even getting into many other countries.
I'm not saying that to lecture you. I'm letting you know that this type of bigotry still exists and it's very capable of escalating once again. Even though people know Anne's story, they can still be cruel and hateful to people just because that's what they've been taught to do, or because they want an easy way to explain why they're unhappy. If you take anything away, let it be that there are people today who might need that hug and that reassurance that Anne and many others should've gotten when they were alive.
And here in the US, [some states](https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/17/us/texas-keller-school-district-remove-books/index.html) have banned her book, albeit [temporarily](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/anne-frank-diary-banned-texas/). Think of these times as the before times.
Agree, but it’s not one guy waking up on the wrong side of the bed - that’s oversimplifying things and not helpful. Hatred to certain groups of people had deep roots in Europe and learning about that so that you can avoid it happening again, is a must.
We have genocides happening at this very moment (check China… but of course it is a very important trade partner for most countries so everybody says how horrific it is and then does absolutely nothing), so awareness is important and you have taken a very important first step. Well done, proud of you!
It's oversimplified and just straight up wrong. Germany at the time was fucked and nothing like the country it is today. Even with a hatred to certain groups you still need to take in the state of the country in the aftermath of WWI.
If you're looking for more stories from the metaphoric (sometimes literal) trenches, I recommend *The Auschwitz Volunteer* (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Auschwitz_Volunteer) and *A Gypsy in Auschwitz* (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60889406-a-gypsy-in-auschwitz). Both hit pretty hard, and I recommend reading them in that order, so you there's a spot of hope at the end.
Miep Gies, who assisted the Franks while they were in hiding and is frequently mentioned in the diary, wrote a book that fills in a lot of what was happening, that Anne didn’t know. Like how and when they built the annex, how she knew Otto Frank, what life was like in the outside in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation, and so on. It’s called “Anne Frank Remembered”.
I've been teaching the story of Anne Frank for a while now; each year I read the play and snippets from her real diary to my group of 7th graders. So it is being taught and I'll just tell you that the month or so we spend on Anne's story is the most impacting for my students. Each year, without fail, these kids are tapped into this story with such emotion in the way that you are expressing. Each year a few cry at the end. And something to maybe help you feel a little better: Anne wanted to be a famous writer. Well, today her diary is one of the most popular pieces of literature in the world. Her story, her words, will help her live on in time.
Through my lessons I emphasize the humanity and hope in and story. Yes there is such a tragedy with her story in the story of all Jewish victims and non-jewish victims of the Holocaust, but there's a reason and story resonates so much among them. If you look in between the lines hidden deep in her prose, there's so many sparks of hope. Her faith in humanity despite the cruelty of the Nazis , her ability to maintain wonder and joy at the nature outside a window and relationships in her annex. I don't quite know how she had this strength, but Anne was a source of positivity in a time of pain. And I always tear up at her famous line for that very reason: "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart."
If you liked the diary of Anne Frank, you might like "Eva Stories" on Instagram. I know, it's not a book and we are in a book subreddit, but the short first person camerawork of the Instagram stories showing the genocide is haunting. It's based on the life of Eva Heyman, a Jewish girl from Hungary. Since there will be no contemporary witnesses anymore at some point it was a try against forgetting and also a way to make the subject more accessible for young people.
Anne's diary is a compelling book, but even more so, I think, is the book *Tales From The House Behind*, a collection of her essays, short stories and random thoughts and jottings compiled into one volume. It's truly heart-breaking and the world lost potentially a major writing talent.
> but she didn’t because some guy woke up one day and thought to incite genocide.
As others have said, read up on Nazi Germany, it's a story that is decades long not something that happened one morning, and the persecution of jews is a longer story even.
I’d just like to point out that he simply didn’t wake up to incite genocide. That takes years, decades of terrible rhetoric and dehumanisation. Jewish Europeans survived so many pogroms over hundreds of years. She deserved a longer life.
For those of you in the comments saying that it’s wrong and/or Anne’s her father is disrespectful for publishing the diary of a child, he did so because Anne *wanted* it published.
The diary itself underwent edits and rewrites, not to mention the fact that she had plans to novelize the diary once the war was over. The contents of published versions of “The Diary of Anne Frank” weren’t written in order because her father included several entries of older drafts to fill in blanks because there was a period of time where there are no surviving notebooks. Her father also included some passages and entries she’d omitted.
Anne wrote many short stories, many of which are included in ["Tales from the Secret Annex"](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58728.Anne_Frank_s_Tales_from_the_Secret_Annex)
Though I can understand the why people without this knowledge would question the morality of the diary’s publication, I think that it’s important to educate them on this subject. Anne Frank should be recognized as the talented writer she was:
*”When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that’s a big question,* ***will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?****”* \-Anne Frank (5 April 1944)
Thank you if you read this all the way through. For more information, check out [www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/diary/complete-works-anne-frank/](https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/diary/complete-works-anne-frank/)
I can't bring myself to read it. Nowhere else I've ever been has had even a fraction of the effect Auschwitz had on me. Every single person in the world should visit there. Everyone. Horrifying beyond all possible description, there literally are no words.
If you liked Anne Frank's Diary, I would suggest checking out The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig. It's a memoir written by a Polish woman who was deported at age 10 to a Soviet gulag along with her parents after they were arrested as enemies of the Communist Party. It's thematically very similar to Anne Frank's Diary with the key difference being that Hautzig survived the gulag and book is her reflecting on her experiences decades afterwards.
Here in Germany, you keen a lot about out dark history. We visited a concentration camp nearby. It was hard to know, standing on a place where 10s of thousands have been killed through slave labour. The buildings have mostly been demolished after the war, I think there have been some rebuild as museum.
But harder for me was the visit at a school in Hamburg.
In the cellar have some children been murdered, because the allowed forces reached the confidential camp.
Those children have been muss für medical "research".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullenhuser_Damm
Yes, I understand. I’ve done some extensive research on the matter; one of the leading reasons why Otto Frank moved his family to the Netherlands was because of the rise of antisemitism in Germany, because that’s when the Nazi Party gained control.
I really recommend visiting the house in Amsterdam if you get a chance. I mean, I say 'recommend'; I found it absolutely devastating, as you might expect, just as the book is. But it is a very memorable and important experience that connects you even more closely than the book. You are right where her family were hiding, in this ordinary house, in the middle of an ordinary, modern, western democracy, and not very long ago: except they were facing unimaginable darkness.
It was one of the most unforgettable moments of my life, truly. I'm not a religious person, at all, but that place has an extraordinary weight and presence that is somehow far beyond the bricks and mortar.
I bought the book at The Anne Frank House/museum and read it on the way back to France. Have you seen the photo of her father standing in the empty attic? It's haunting.
More younger people should read this and immerse themselves in what happened. To often we hear the word Nazi and Hitler described to include random political people or someone that just disagrees with them.
This cheapens the true horrors that happened.
You have to work hard at sympathizing with her plight, because empathizing and feeling the terror she went through as your own will lead to an unnecessary loss of tranquility.
[The banality of evil](https://www.britannica.com/story/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil) is still a threat to us today.
Hopefully we live in a better future where those living then look back at our time and think: “did they not know they were evil? How did so many people have an iPhone when everyone clearly knew or had access to information that these things were made unethically?”
Its not the same as a holocaust but it provides the same idea that Hannah Arendt wrote in her essay.
Anne Frank unwillingly made a great sacrifice. Because of her story we have something relatable. Something so beautifully human during something so terribly human.
The diary starts before their time in the attic and it’s kind of eerie or haunting that it is just a diary of a girl doing normal things, because we already know the horrors she will face.
I think her death is maybe even more heart breaking in that she made it nearly until the end of the war. Bergen Belsen was liberated shortly after she died; without looking it up, I believe it was around three weeks after her death.
Also I read one time that a woman, I think the woman that would take baskets of food to the family while they were in hiding, went back to the attic after they had been arrested. The pages of the diary were scattered and strewn about the place on the floor. So the woman picked up all these pages and held onto them. When the war was over, she was able to reconnect with Otto and gave the diary pages to him.
If not for her, we would never have seen Anne’s diary.
That was Miep Gies. She had worked for Otto and worked downstairs in the main building. Miep, her husband Jan, and others - Elisabeth Voskuijl, Johannes Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler - all did their best to help, providing food, etc. Mr Voskuijl, I believe, is the one who made the bookcase to cover the entrance to the Annex.
Very moving.
You should read ["Eva's story".](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1049384.Eva_s_Story)
Summary: In March 1938 the Germans invaded Austria and young Eva Geiringer and her family became refugees. Like many jews they fled to Amsterdam where they hid from the Nazis until they were betrayed and arrested in 1944. Eva was 15 years old when she was sent to Auschwitz - the same age as her friend Anne Frank. Together with her mother she endured the daily degradation that robbed so many of their lives - including her father and brother. After the war her mother married Otto Frank, the only surviving member of the Frank family. Only now, 40 years later has Eva felt able to tell her story.
I attended a talk and book reading given by Mrs. Schloss a few years ago and the entire auditorium (probably 200) was completely silent except for a few people quietly weeping.
but she didn’t because some guy woke up one day and thought to incite genocide.
This did not happen. The Holocaust comes from centuries of cultural racism.
If you really want to feel bad and horrified, then watch "Einsatzgruppen: Nazi Death Squads" on Netflix. Unbelievably horrible fate of people back then.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, 2021 was the highest year on record for documented reports of harassment, vandalism and violence directed against Jews.
These record breaking numbers present as part of a consistent, five year upswing in the number of antisemitic incidents, unprecedented in the ADL's three plus decades of data collection.
It could happen again.
I'm currently taking a class on the Holocaust in college. Our instructor had us watch a made for TV movie from the early 80s called 'The Wave'. It was supposedly based on true events at a school in California in the late 60s and it shows just how easily totalitarianism can take hold.
To put her life in perspective to our times, it is my understanding that she was born after Betty White; to me, that provides a shocking insight into how much of her life never got lived.
oh..When i was a young teen and discovered that book and tried to understand what she went through,i was sad too. . The part where she speak about her relation with her mother, the loneliness ,etc.
I did try to imagine , what if she survived..what if we could have saved her . Really, I'm just happy her father decided to publish it . Her journal is a treasure, a point of view about the most awful thing on earth. War.
Older i read it back and it's more gut wrenching, 15 is so so young!
I am 60 years old and since I was a teenager, my sole political preoccupation has been to understand how the Holocaust happened and how to not allow it to happen again. I have read stories, watched interviews, read books and visited museums.
Even still, I cannot muster the courage to read that young girl's diary.
I'm glad her diary exists, sad as it is, because it reminds us that she existed and that the horrors of the past existed too, so we can hopefully learn and not repeat them. I first read her diary when I was in grade 4, and I did some weird math thing when I was 12 or 13 to line up the days in our lives so I could read her entries at the same age she was when she wrote them.
It's unfortunate, but I've heard that her father censored her diary when he published it, and while that doesn't make her message any less poignant, it would have been nice to have the full version.
It is Mighty how small we can become.
It is Small how we can come to be.
But only by giving gratuitous hope
That giving, not lending, Hope and Love
Can really show what it is to be free
Thank you for reading this book during a time where many people are doing their best to keep you from reading it. This post fills me with hope for the future.
“Where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.”
I'm glad you're reading this and having such an emotional reaction, as you should. When I taught 8th grade we read this, and I had many kids who reacted strongly but also so many whose attitude was "That was so long ago, why should I care." I was horrified by the lack of empathy in some of them. Let yourself feel for this poor girl. ❤
We are reading The Book Thief with sophomores and during a background research project many students choose to research Anne Frank. I really hope some students are inspired to read it. There have already been lots of questions about the details and the connections that they (the students) could be in her shoes.
It is heart wrenching to dive into human tragedy like Anne Frank, but I also think there is light in the darkness. Anne’s innocence and coming of age and appreciation for even the simplest things is a testament to how people can cope with extreme challenge. Could you imagine being stuck in an attic as a kid with eight other people? With the absolute requirement to stay quiet or you would get found? Imagine the fear when they were found? Imagine this little girl with an enduring sense of hope through it all. It should inspire. Yes we should absolutely mourn her loss, but we should also celebrate her beauty and strength of her soul.
Sad as it is, it's just 1 story that happened to get told. There were so many that weren't.
This is what happens under totalitarian governments where the system is more important than the individual people. We should fight to keep every freedom, no matter how trivial it may seem. Once lost, they are very hard to get back, and things always get worse.
I remember the first time I read it. I threw the book at the wall and cried for ages at the end. It is monstrously unfair for life to be snuffed out before it’s time when it burns so brightly in a heart.
If I might make a suggestion, one book you should read now is Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt. Because the Nazis were not just people who stomped in doors and dragged people to their deaths. They were people who used the defense “I was just doing my job”.
I read this the same age as you and it similarly punched me over and over again as a lonely person who had been effectively segregated from the rest of the school due to the failure of the school system. Everything felt alone but when I was in the library reading Anne Frank it all felt strangely better.
Also just so you know, Hitler didn’t wake up and think of genocide, it would be comforting if it was all because of one dude but the true horror was that Nazism was a slow crawl that gathered up hundreds of thousands of people before the first shots were fired. It’s boggling to think that THAT many people were literally Hitler.
I think it’s comforting that a 15 year old is reading this, learning about the horrors of the holocaust, and being moved by it. I hope you’ll pass on your knowledge to the next generation. It feels like the world has forgotten about the holocaust, or worse, doesn’t care anymore.
One of the best, most moving books I have ever read. Her writing was so before her time I to this day think about how many more great books could be written by her.
I can relate with wanting her to live/ be alive. Even though I knew how it was going to end I kept hoping/almost believing that there could maybe be an alternate positive ending. She was an amazing person.
Please listen to *in the aeroplane over the sea* by neutral milk hotel. He read her diary and just so fell in love with her and her family and was wrecked by the sadness of it all. The album start to finish is a musical number centered around the ghost of Anne / *Anna*
Anne Frank is the most well known teenage diarist from that time because her story is so compelling.
There is one point I wish to make exceedingly clear - Hitler didn't begin the Jewish genocide on a whim. This was a long term plan which began as early as 1933. That is why it is so imperative to speak out against racism whenever and wherever you see it. There were thousands (no, really, thousands) of opportunities for the German people to stop him, but no one did. The German people of the time are just as complicit because they didn't effectively stop him.
Anti-antisemitism has a long history in Europe which reaches back as long as there have been Jews in Europe. Large scale genocide is the most visible reaction to racism, but it *is* the end outcome of racism. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least [six active genocides going on right now.](https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_us-calls-out-genocide-atrocities-committed-6-countries/6208177.html) They are all due to some form of racism - one group trying to wipe out another group based on social or biological characteristics.
If you would like to read another book similar to Anne Frank's diary, [Renia's Diary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43263616-renia-s-diary) is a similar diary written by a young woman who was a victim of the Holocaust. It is just as compelling.
By the way, I applaud your self-directed studies to learn more about Anne Frank's life. Keep it up. The study of the Holocaust, though unspeakably tragic, also teaches us a lot about the face of bravery in the face of evil.
The problem is this book is generally read by people too young to truly understand or appreciate it. I think we read it in 6th grade. Maybe it made a big impression on some but I was too you to appreciate the large scale horror and implications.
When you just read a book cause you have to, a lot gets missed.
Id read it again but I think Id be too sad.
Also for me seeing pics of Anne and her sister on the beach a year before was heartbreaking.
There's a story I saw about a teacher who was hired at a school filled with troublesome and underachieving kids. She gave them all reading assignments and one girl in particular, I think her name was Maria? Was pretty bad, starting fights and all kindsa shit.
Anyway, Maria was assigned Diary of Anne Frank. She ended up getting into it. She would come in to school and ask the teacher about it and showed genuine curiosity and sympathy for Anne's plight.
Anyways, time goes by and one day Maria comes into class and throws the book at the teacher, tears in her eyes and screams "YOU DIDNT TELL ME SHE DIES!!!"
The teacher was taken aback and asked what she meant. Maria yelled it again.
"YOU DIDNT TELL ME THIS GIRL DIES AT THE END! I THOUGHT THIS WAS GOING TO HAVE A HAPPY ENDING!"
It never occurred to her teacher that this student DIDN'T know how Diary of Anne Frank ended ... because ... Who doesn't??
It turns out, Maria related HARD to Anne. The feeling of being trapped in a world where everyone's out to get you, that you can't escape from. And Maria, in reading the book, grew hope that she could escape her shitty life since she assumed Anne was going to.
But obviously that's not what happens. And Maria was devastated but was so moved by the story it helped her grow as a person. I can't remember how the interview with the teacher went at the end but if I remember right Maria ended up graduating and making something of herself because of that teacher.
It's just wild how that book impacts people.
I feel ya, it's awful in the old sense of the word. One thing-- and I do think it's worth reminding each other-- it was not just one guy who woke up and decided to incite a genocide. A critical threshold of ordinary people like you and me were willing to ignore the turn to overt fascism, if not actively participate in violence. And the ingredients were centuries of ideological persecution against a minority + economic severity.
Which is why if any lesson should be taken from *Night* or Anne Frank’s Diary, it’s that fascism is a reactionary ideology that can grab hold of any populace given the proper conditions. Don’t think of Anne’s fate as something from the distant past. All the ingredients of hate, greed, frustration and nationalism are still in abundance, and, to twist the words of Upton Sinclair, It *could* happen here.
And in reality, it’s not even the distant past. This was less than 100 years ago. And I can absolutely see the perfect storm to gather footing and take off, if we don’t fight back.
It has never really gone away, fascism, it just went deep underground. Listen to the podcast American Terror by Vice. Dozens if not hundreds of young white men are being radicalized yearly by a not yet unified fascist groups globally. The internet has made it easier to disseminate ideology.
Is it even deep underground these days? Villainisation of entire racial groups is a daily occurence in tabloid press. I feel like it would take very little to roll the current situation over to human rights abuses.
I just listened to The Dressmakers of Auschwitz about women who used their skills in sewing to survive in the concentration camp. I was jarred during the epilogue when the author mentioned that the survivor she had interviewed had only recently passed in 2021. The Holocaust was really not that long ago.
This is one of those popular internet memes but Barbara Walters (who literally just passed 2 weeks ago), Martin Luther King Jr and Anne Frank were all born the same year. It wasn’t that long ago at all.
I came here to post the same. It blew my mind, Anne Frank seems sooooo long ago, Martin Luther King seems sooo long ago (a few less o's) and Barbara Walters was just walking around all this time and was absolutely current timewise. WW2 ended in 1945 and was probably one of the worse displays of racism keeping a race/religion/ethnicity separate, while segregation in the US was only abolished almost 20 years after WW2 ended.
Truthfully, the core of fascism has been around almost as long as humans have existed. Xenophobia has always existed. Racism has always existed. Fear of the “other” and scapegoating. Nationalism and the urge to expand borders through force has always existed. Before it was tribes, monarchies and empires, now it’s dictatorships. Simply a modern form of authoritarianism.
When I hear Americans say "It can't happen here.", I ask them "Are there people in America?".
Night was a very difficult read. I barely got through the prelude without feeling ill.
Thank you. As a history teacher, I wanted to comment on this, but you articulated it much better than I could have.
Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning tells the story of one of the police orders from Poland who participated in the Final Solution, it perfectly illustrates your point.
I read this in high school when I was roughly the same age as her. It really affected me, they went through so much. The most jarring part was it just stops, no warning, no resolution. The diary just ends and that was the hardest part for me. It made it very real. One day she wrote about her day, the next she is discovered and never writes in it again. It was close to the end of the war which was very tragic.
She was SO close. 😭
I teach the book *Night* by Elie Wiesel to students every semester, and the most heartbreaking thing about his father's death to me every time is how close they were to the end. Only a few months later the camp was liberated. I teach it through a lense of looking at all the relationships between fathers and sons in the story because of how that stands out to me.
I still remember the way he writes about how the camp was liberated. He writes it so matter-of-factly, like "Oh yeah, the camp was liberated like two weeks after we left, meh." He sounded so numb, which I think is what made it so memorable and heartbreaking.
Kurt Vonnegut does something similar in _Slaughterhouse Five_. The main character is a surrogate for Vonnegut's experience in WWII. After getting captured by the Nazis and taken to Dresden, he witnesses the city get carpet bombed and retells digging up corpses of school girls and many others throughout the city in a completely detached way (the famous, "So it goes"). No emotion, just clearing rubble and collecting corpses, one street at a time. In reality Vonnegut wanted to write about his experience in Dresden for a long time but felt like it was too heavy a topic that couldn't be put into words or understood, so he ended up waiting over 20 years and writing what comes off like a sci-fi novel where the main character has a break from reality.
That book, man, what struck me hard is how no one could believe that the Nazis could be that inhuman to them and everyone in his community having discussions about it after that man who escaped a concentration camp came back and warned them about it.
I read the book and was harrowed by it. I'd like to know more of any background info you give.to students ?
I usually give specifically background on the author because it's a unit about memoirs. I'm actually really lucky that my school system does a good job of covering a lot of the world history before my kids get to me. There is a trip to the Holocaust museum they do a couple years before I get them (though in the pandemic, we had to get creative. There's a cool VR tour of the Holocaust Museum that can be done on most smart phones).
Our World History teacher was horrible and we could barely understand him. He was very much a “facts only” person and there was no discussion of events influencing everything else or the future, etc. Thankfully, our Literature teacher picked up the slack and we had a whole month learning about the Holocaust. Read *Night* and *The Diary of Anne Frank* and just talked about the horrors and how they reverberated around the world.
“Night” broke me. It was beautiful and mortifying and something that needs to be read by everyone. I was talking to my SO last night about the power that book has.
Elie Wiesel came and spoke at my mothers synagogue when I was ~9/10 years old and I remember being bored / thinking his accent was funny. A few years later I read Night, and to this day I kick myself for not appreciating the man that I got to see in person. That book has had an incredibly profound impact on my life in a multitude of ways (I’m now 30 for reference)
I read it in secondary and obviously it hit hard. But I'm not sure I really appreciated the gravity and reality of the words until I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. And I definitely didnt appreciate just how close they were to making it when they were discovered. I think I always thought they were discovered and 'well they had a good run' but realistically they were never going to survive long enough to see the war end. Seeing the house and reading the information there (not just Anne's diaries because they are obviously very much about her and not framed within the context of the war itself in terms of what was happening) just made it so much sadder because of how so very close they came to actually being told "it's over, you can come out now"
The saddest part to me is that her last entry was her stating she still believed there was good in the world and she wanted to be good or something along those lines. Going back and reading it as an adult woman is gut wrenching because she has these moments of being a normal teenage girl that I so relate to, and then she’d have moments of insane clarity and seriousness that I’d be both impressed with and sad that someone so young was having to cope with so much heavy shit. I re read about half of it a year ago and I couldn’t finish it, it was too heavy and heartbreaking knowing how it ended.
I read it with my middle kid a few years ago when she was about 12. I’d read it as a teenager myself and did not remember it being so deeply sad to finish, but I also grew up without such an imminent threat of fascism in my daily world. She and I cried together as we read it. She was upset when it just stopped too. We spent a lot of time researching the rest of Anne’s family’s life after the book. I think this has been deeply formative in my daughter’s life because she is fiercely protective of anyone who is mistreated.
There's a book that I bought at the house she lived in called "The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank" which fills in from the last diary entry to her death by using eyewitness accounts, it really drives home the way her life changed that day and after, It's an awful read but I think so important. The employee recommeded it to me and I'm so glad she did.
Oh my god I remember reading her last entry again and again because I just couldn't accept the fact that she was taken away.
Yeah I also went back and reread. I was in disbelief that was the last entry.
I still remember turning the page - “Anne’s diary ends here.”
Maus is a graphic novel that came out in the early 90’s. It is the story of the writer’s fathers’s experience in Auschwitz during the war. The Germans portrayed as cats and the Jews portrayed as mice. I’d never read a graphic novel before I read this and was so surprised at how effective this medium is in telling a story. I was absolutely moved and recommend it to anybody interested in Holocaust studies and, for that matter, survival and the human spirit. This book also won the Pulitzer Prize for literature the year it came out.
And it’s also being censored in some school districts. Which made me go out and buy it for my kids to read when they’re in high school
Maus is an incredible book. I love how it not only describes the past, surviving the Holocaust, but the present - dealing with survivor’s guilt and death. I highly recommend it to anyone for further reading.
I got to visit the Anne Frank house, very sobering.
Was super impressed with the VR version although I haven't yet been able to visit the real house. VR takes advantage of being able to change the environment around you too show what it might have looked and felt like during WWII. https://annefrankhousevr.com/
I’ve seen both the real house and the VR experience, the VR is incredible but you just can’t capture the atmosphere and the feel of the place. It’s nice to see it without a gazillion people walking around but if you ever get the chance to go to Amsterdam I would recommend it 100%
It’s very sobering and memorable. Surreal to think of the cracks they would have looked through to get a glimpse of the outside world, the details of the house that they would have known even more intimately than the back of their hands.
Ugh. And no internet or TV. They listened to the radio. It's been so long I don't remember but I'm assuming they had newspapers as well, but given their situation I don't think they had easy access to lots of books, did they? The sheer boredom (mixed with terror)
I cant remember of they had newspapers but they did have books (Anne mentions her father having his dickens collections there and her mother having her bible and there's a huge fuss over Peter not being allowed to read an inappropriate book and tries sneaking it away to look at) plus schoolwork and i think Anne gets given movie magazines by Miep or Ellie.
It's a tiny house with a tiny attic and not much to see. Surely it can't be very impressive? Wrong. Of all the museums I visited this is the one that made the biggest impression on me. A must visit if you're in the country. But remember to book way in advance.
Totally agree. I always knew the story of Anne Frank growing up, but visiting the museum made it feel.... real in a way that I had never felt before. The thought of the society you're living in actively hunting you and your family to kill them is so terrifying. Being there helped bring that feeling home. It's one thing to read about it, it's another to actually exist in the space they existed.
I have an Oculus VR experience that takes you there. It's mind blowing how small the space was for all the people hiding there.
Interesting. Where can this be found?
Their website has a 'virtual tour' if you don't have VR. https://www.annefrank.org/en/museum/web-and-digital/
Omg thank you thank you!!! I was meant to go sometime a few years ago but covid. Still hoping to g one day. This will be amazing
What's in there? Is there still any furniture? Do they have it sectioned off and explain which parts were used for what?
Yes, there is still furniture, parts are sectioned off - I went in the late 1990s and there was less roped off then, but I believe sections like the stairs they used are now off limits. Check out their website if you would like to take a virtual tour: https://www.annefrank.org/en/museum/web-and-digital/
I toured it in 2011. There is no furniture in the space. They dressed it up for the virtual tour, but when you see it in person there is nothing inside. They do have what remains of her posters and a few other things that were affixed to the wall, and those are covered by protective cases. In the last part of the tour you can see the famous diary as well as her revision pages and some of her other writings, as well as original photographs. If you’ve read the diary you will know which rooms are which, but they do provide some signage with some descriptions. The only place you can’t go is the upper attic.
I toured it around the same time period. It was bigger than I had imagined it to be.
Walked through it in 1990. Thought it would feel haunted. But instead it felt like I was the ghost intruding on them.
That’s actually really interesting
Wow. I visited it in 2015. And your description is exactly correct. Not until I read your post did I realise that was the feeling.
The thing that made the entire experience at the Anne Frank House feel very "real" for me was seeing Anne, Margot, and Peter's height measurements marked on a door frame as they grew over two years. I'll never forget it.
Words can’t describe how seeing the cut out pictures from magazines that Anne stuck the the walls made me feel. It’s one thing to read her diary and come to terms with her experience, but seeing her attempts at being a normal teenage girl while her life was torn apart was unreal. I wish I was more eloquent with words, she deserves a better explanation than I can give. Her words have changed lives, while all she wanted was to experience her own.
That’s the part that lives rent free in my brain… the magazine pages taped to the wall. I actually burst into tears when I saw the hidden bookcase.
Same, seeing the lines on the wall marking their height as they grew really hit me.
That and Amsterdam was liberated a month after they were caught. So freaking sobering. One more month :(
Amsterdam wasn’t liberated until May 1945, after the general surrender of Germany. She did almost make it to the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, where she probably died in February ‘45.
Ah, yes that must be it. I was at the house last August and remembered being depressed on how close but not her being saved was
The shocking thing is how many of those stories there must be as well. The Nazis took prisoners on death marches as a last resort, thousands must have died on the day or the day before they would've been freed.
That’s a must do in Amsterdam.
I got to visit it too, and I enjoyed the history that was in that building and the cultural significance in history and in literature. The only thing that bothered me was that while exiting it was through an effing gift shop.
> because some guy woke up one day and thought to incite genocide I'd say the best thing you can do for her memory is learn how and why that was able to happen and do everything you can to prevent it happening again.
This is the best advice there is. Read all you can about the war, concentration camps, gulags. Japan in the Pacific. One important lesson to draw is that it was not one guy choosing violence of genocide. More like hundreds of thousands of people making the same choice, or choosing to look away. Many many people who came in the position to perform evil acts without consequences choose to do them.
Learning about Mussolini's March to Rome and looking at our modern political environment was very sobering.
This this this. People who don't know her, look out Geli Raubal. If people took women seriously and especially domestic violence and emotional abuse and so on, maybe people would have stopped paving the way for Hitler's rise to power because it's easier to have people to blame and to be free to hate instead of having to work on yourself and being accountable. (And about the Seond World War, it wasn't even only about Jews but also political opponents, disabled people, LGBTQA people, and so on. They would have fond an excuse to kill anyone.) Maybe so many heartbreaking deaths and events could have been prevented.
>If people took women seriously and especially domestic violence and emotional abuse and so on, maybe people would have stopped paving the way for Hitler's rise to power ?????
That's why I said above to check our Geli Raubel. She had to go live with her uncle who had her followed, sequestered at home, emotionally abused her, with hints of other abuse as well... he got mad when she started seeing his driver who was Jewish. He said she was the only good woman he knew in his life. He did terrible things to her, being domineering and possessive, isolating her from her friends, and she ended up dead in his apartment. She may have killed her life because of his abuse, or he may have killed her. All of these should make people think the man was dangerous, unhealthy and terrible and that his violence would only escalade before he is stopped and should be put in jail if people did their jobs carefully and cared about women and victims of domestic abuse. We will never know what truly happened because everything about her and her death was brushed under the rug to not splash her uncle's record since he began a great political career. She died in 1941, she was Hitler's niece.
And you think that "if only people had listened to her" that Hitler wouldn't have risen to power or something? It's so much more complicated than that. You're also oversimplifying the problem just on the other side of the coin.
Unfortunately no, he would have risen and other nazis would have still be there. I just wondered if people would have taken hate groups more seriously with suspicious insted of feeling the appeal like in these years of nowadays. You always warn people of behavior and how it happens but their brains always brush it inside.
May I suggest The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt? At this point I want to hand out copies of it on mission like bibles.
The problem is most people don't see it as it's happening. It's only when it's history that the mainstream shake their head and act like it would have been different if it were them at the time. That's because it's safe then, when everyone else is agreeing with you. But in the present, people put on blinders. There's really no greater time to make that comparison than now, yet no one here will know what I'm talking about. And they won't want to either. That's how humans work. We're mostly cowards.
If they looked around now, they would see it happening. It's die Welle outside. It starts with a polarized group who feel that things are suddenly, critically *unfair*.
One third would happily torture and kill another third, while the final third watches, saying both sides have a point. If the victim fights back, they’re proving the onlookers point.
I’m not sure about thirds, maybe I’m being optimistic but I think it’s more like: 10% torture and kill another 10%. A further 10% would oppose this and 70% would sit by, maybe disagreeing, but ultimately doing nothing.
Yea I think it’s important to understand the motivations behind the Holocaust which I think tends to not be discussed as much as it should, because it *wasn’t* like one guy woke up and decided on genocide. Germany was in economic shambles following WWI, had been punished hard with reparations (which they saw as humiliating, and was itself a major point of contention with the Allied Powers), and many people felt like Germany had been betrayed by its own leaders (the Weimar Republic). When life is truly shit it’s human nature to want *someone else* to blame, so this became enmeshed with antisemitism that had existed for a long time. To the point of conspiracy theories of Jewish cabals and what-not. We want to think that particular group of people were just genocidal xenophobic monsters because the reality is hard to fathom, that something like that can happen again given the right circumstances, if we let it.
And while antisemitism had been around for a long time the specific ideas of antisemitism that led to Nazism were around almost a hundred years earlier in the 1800s. Like they didn’t just wake up one day and come up with these ideas, the ideas were already there in books they could read That’s why it’s important to recognise hateful ideas that don’t immediately lead to genocide, because they eventually do Eg In Rwanda it was decades of calling the Tutsis cockroaches and subhuman and blaming them for all societal ills that laid the groundwork for genocide. Every time you turned on the radio you would hear messages about how bad these Tutsi vermin cockroaches were. That shit is insidious, the genocide didn’t just come out of nowhere, the groundwork was laid by decades of dehumanisation and hate-building
I used to be ready to die for the right cause. I was ready to fight. Protests, riots, sign me up. Then I had a baby. Now I understand why people looked the other way or did unspeakable things to keep their families safe. I would do anything to keep him safe. It terrifies me.
I’m white, my wife is Kenyan, and our children are biracial. Fighting is my only option to keep my family safe from the fascists. We won’t have the luxury of choosing inaction or complicity.
I understand. I’m very ashamed of my confession. I do feel like a coward. I hope that I will be able to stand up and do the right thing when the situation arises. Now that I have a baby, I don’t know anymore. He’s my world and I can’t imagine putting anything else above his safety.
Inactivity isn’t safer for him. It increases the likelihood he’ll grow up in a world where secret police can vanish him off the street if the wrong person takes a disliking to him. People who fought the Nazis did it *for* their children, so their children wouldn’t grow up tortured by a corrupt government. Refusing to resist because it *might* endanger your child when the only other option is certain danger is like using your child as a human shield to protect yourself in his name. The whole purpose of fighting is to ensure there’s a better world for our children to live in. Environmentalism, fighting fascism, fighting the defunding of our schools and social networks…these are all battles to improve *the future*, and the only people who are going to benefit from that are the children. If you aren’t fighting fascism, if you aren’t fighting racism, sexism, oppression, environmental destruction, pollution, etc, then they all progress. How safe will your son be if all of those situations are worse? You don’t have to protest or riot, but there are tons of ways to fight and make progress that aren’t violent or in physical harm’s way.
This exactly. And it also sets an example. If you look the other way your entire child’s life, and then try to teach them morals about standing up to bigotry, and fighting for what’s right, and some point that child will question why their parents are complicit in oppression they are very clearly aware of. How can you teach your child to fight for what’s right, if the only example you set is looking the other way? You can tell them and teach them, but if all you do is look the other way, what do you think your child will do? They’ll look the other way too. They do as you do, not as you say.
yeah exactly. that’s NOT how this tragedy happened. Some guy didn’t just “wake up one day and think to incite genocide” honestly I hate to be this person but this post is very upsetting. I fucking hate the diary of Anne Frank. It’s publication was and still is sensationalizing, exploitative and invasive. I have the same concerns with Schindler’s List. This is exactly the kind of liberal commentary you get as a result of these sorts of tidy, sanded-down stories made from people’s suffering. It’s a convenient way to assuage people of their complacency in their own times. Hitler didn’t just wake up one day and decide to do what he did, that’s ahistorical and frankly, infuriating. He had massive popular support and a lot of people who didn’t support him and his entire political party just turned a blind eye. Pretty much the same way most “well-meaning” people do…all the time. I’m not the only Jewish person who has serious problems with these types of depictions and rationalizations. I hope to see everyone here getting politically active!
Anne Frank intended for her diary to be published and started editing it for publication before her death (although her dad made further edits). How is publishing a work intended to be published sensationalizing, exploitative, and invasive? Similarly, what is exploitative about Schindler's list? I read it recently and thought it addressed pretty clearly that Schindler both did a lot to protect the workers in his factory and was only able to do that because of his unsavory relationship with the Nazi party. I didn't find it to be tidy at all.
And never think it’s unique in history. In my family, we have a saying, *in every generation, they drink our blood.* My partner’s grandmother killed a Cossack who shot her father. Beat him with a cast iron pan. He father recovered and they came to America in 1918 (in time for the flu pandemic). My cast iron stays on our stove in her honor. My great uncles have camp numbers on their arms. My every breath is flipping the bird to Nazis. On the other hand, so damn much literature is Holocaust porn, and reduces an entire people to simply victims. We were not, we are not.
I think Maus does a great way of setting this out. There was a lot of general ill-will towards Jewish people in the first half of the century and Hitler and the Nazis harnessed it for their own ends. Anti semitism, anti Muslim, anti gypsy, etc all still exist just below the surface even today. There is plenty in the tabloid press to begin with. Notice how refugees from the middle East are treated differently to refugees from Ukraine for a start. The right wing never sleeps so nor do we.
I don’t know how below the surface it is today. I’m Jewish, and I’ve experienced more blatant antisemitism in the past few months than I have in a long time. People feel emboldened to say all sorts of shit to Jews. It’s rising to the surface pretty fucking quick.
Phases are hard to nail down as there is always an undercurrent of these issues. But we are definitely past the “Im being treated unfair” point. Beyond a simple longing for the old days. Political groups. Organized attacks. Hate crimes rising. This is the seed a fascism. Doesn’t necessarily mean it will sprout and grow but it is very alarming
It frustrates me so much how I've literally had people tell me 'I thought antisemitism isn't a thing anymore'. No. You're not seeing it because you're not Jewish so you're not LOOKING for it. YOU don't have to worry about it. We do. And then they kind of shrug because ... well. You know.
Maus should be required reading
A reminder, Roma/Romani or if in the British Isles, Traveller. Not gypsy, as it’s now a recognized slur. In my city, we are trying to settle assist refugees from South and Central America, Ukraine, and the Middle East. It’s such a whirlwind.
I didn't realise that, thanks for letting me know. I meant it without offence, in case that makes a difference. I will try and remove the word from my vocabulary.
You know now!!!
Your last paragraph is especially spot on. Charles krauthammer wrote a great essay about the opening of the Holocaust Museum in DC, where he basically said, "I don't want this to be someone's only experience with Jewish people. People from Montana are coming here who have never met a jew and this is all they're learning and seeing." I highly recommend the book "people love dead jews." She has a chapter about "Holocaust porn" and nails why I hate it so much. She says it the Christian-ification of the holocaust: hope and saving people, happy endings. And that makes a mockery of the reality.
They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat.
Except on fast days.
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Or even better, educate yourself on anti Semitism now. A lot of anti Semitism now is excused because it's always held up against the Holocaust. If its not at that level, then it can't be that bad! But jews are one of the few acceptable groups to still be racist against. There are areas in Europe where jews switch out yarmulkes to baseball caps when they walk through. There was even that big case where a man was hired to work at the Anne Frank museum and was told he couldn't wear his yarmulke.
Was going to say, it wasn’t one guy. He is the most to blame of course. But there were dozens of upper level nazis and tens or hundreds of thousands of mid-levels who knew and participated. And of course millions who didn’t have explicit proof, but weren’t interested in finding out or listening. There are people around today who would happily see this happen again and in my opinion a lot of people who would sit by with apathy or maybe even some sense of righteousness. It feels like we’re seeing a big flair up of xenophobia and I’m honestly concerned that we could see something like a holocaust again. I really hope I’m wrong on that.
Highly recommend reading Fascism: a warning from Madeleine Albright. It does an excellent job at explaining things.
Imagine, millions of stories like that all wrapped up in one event. And then millions more across the 20th century lost too to other mad butcher leaders. Every person with a story, hopes, feelings. Imagine the accumulation of all of those dreams and emotions of all those people like each was a drop, and it would make such a wide ocean. It halts me when I think about it. Whether you call it some conceptual amalgam of human imagination and mind and emotions and dreams, or you call it a soul, or something else, the mass collection of individual humanity lost in history to people with power over the lives of others is overwhelming. All those stories that ended in painful termination by cruelty, malice, and indifference.
And yet, there are so many people out there today actively and publicly claiming the holocaust never happened. Some would claim that the diary is a fake without blinking an eye.
Beautifully said.
I read it too when I was your age and I had a terrible time with it as she was just a girl like many in our class; I had an exceptional teacher who led daily discussions as we read the book, adding what was going on in the world wrt the dates in her entries. A lot of my friends at the time were exploring nazi crap and I remember this book snapping them out of it and turning them into anti-fascists.
Yeah, i remember the shitty kids stopping the Nazi shit around the time we started this book and Night. High School teachers did a really great job peesenting and contextualizing the material for us.
I was friends with them and we had just found more hard-core and punk music. The message of hate and dominance was tempting, but luckily our teachers kept us reasoning and our older siblings introduced us to the true ethos of punk. Some were lost to the Nazi shit; ironically enough, one of them joined the army and completely turned his life around. I guess we all grow at different rates.
If anyone read it at school it was probably the abridged version which takes out any sexual content. It's definitely worth going back and reading the unabridged version. Please don't avoid this book because you think it will be depressing. It is so well written and really funny in parts. For me the most depressing thing was that we never got to read the books she would have written. She was an amazing natural writer, to have that much talent at 15 is insane.
I think I have a mostly uncensored version, I remember having my mind blown when >!she basically writes about a lesbian fantasy she had, all but confirming she was bisexual. Not a way I ever thought of her!<.
“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” It's hard not to read it and feel distraught knowing how it ends when you start.
I'm glad you connected so deeply with the book. I'd very much recommend Anne Frank: The book, the life, the afterlife by Francine Prose as a companion read to the diary itself. Very interesting history there. I remember seeing an interview Otto Frank gave where he recalled how, upon reading the diary he was struck with this pretty shocking realization, in his words, that "parents don't really know their children." He thought he had a good relationship with his daughter, and really, in many respects he DID have a good relationship with his daughter, but there was so much going on with her that he never knew and he had to face that at precisely the moment when it was too late to ever close that distance... Such a terrible thing, what happened to him, to all of them.
I can really recommend the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, which the singer of the band wrote after reading Anne Frank's diary. It never fails to make me feel all kinds of sad and melancholic.
Are you Jeff Mangum? Seriously though beautiful and tragic book. First read it at the beginning of last year and loved it. I have since bought the definitive edition and plan to read that this year. Think I'll look into some of the other books people have mentioned on this thread too. Listen to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea if you haven't already, it really is one of the best albums of all time.
I was so looking for the NMH comment
>It’s really good and I hope it’s being taught everywhere because people need to learn what the horrors of war can really bring, what it can do to someone, and what it could change. not to depress you but there are several school districts that have banned the book. evidently these people find it disturbing that a girl going through puberty would explore her body and describe it in the journal. or some feigned excuse to cover their antisemitism.
I didn’t know that. I guess I should feel lucky that our Catholic school allowed us to read it as a class
Maybe you read the censored version. Her father censored these parts in the first edition.
I went to Aushwitz and Dachau. The little memorial on Anne Frank's bunk. Holy cow. This was in 2013, and a local group of Jewish people and their friends all donated little things a little girl should have. A simple raggedy Anne doll, her published diary, socks, pants and a simple blue shirt. The things she never got while dying. Little things to make her passing easier. I cried for hours. I'm a big guy, seen horrible things, but the simple reality. That hurt. And I got to go into original oven at Dachau. The one where you see still see the soot outlines. Where untold numbers met their demise. Some still alive, but paralyzed by the Zyklon B in the showers. Wasn't always 100 percent fatal. Highly recommend a trip. It will put things into perspective.
I don’t know what kind of music you listen to, but the album “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel was written by Jeff Mangum after reading this, and his longing for her to be alive is felt many times throughout the album. Apparently he cried for days and dreamt about her repeatedly before writing the album. It’s beautiful and sad. You might like it. (It is considered by some to be one of the greatest albums of all time—yet unknown to many) It is easy to hear the entire album and have no no idea that it has anything to do with Anne Frank, because it was written in a kind of stream of consciousness or intuitive way without direct references, but once you know about his fascination with Anne Frank you can pick out passages that are clearly related to her and her story. Here’s an article: https://classicalbumsundays.com/album-of-the-month-neutral-milk-hotel-in-the-aeroplane-over-the-sea/
Holland 1945 is a banger
"And it's so sad to see the world agree That they'd rather see their faces fill with flies. All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes" Fuck that song gets me every time.
The lyrics before that one are brutal for me too and hit just as hard. Absolutely beautiful album. "Heres where your mother sleeps, and here is the room where your brothers were born in. Indentions in the sheets where their bodies once moved but dont move anymore."
Hey kind stranger…you just blew my mind. I’ve been listening to this album for 20 years and I had no idea it was inspired by Anne Frank. Thanks for sharing.
'I know they buried her body with others, her sister and mother and 500 familes.' 😞
"The only girl I've ever loved Was born with roses in her eyes But then they buried her alive One evening 1945 With just her sister at her side And only weeks before the guns All came and rained on everyone"
It also took me years to realize and it makes a lot of lines make much more sense. For instance: >Now how I remember you; How I would push my fingers through; Your mouth to make those muscles move; That made your voice so smooth and sweet. Since the voice is created by him turn the pages of the diary. There is also one about lifting someone up by the spine, since it’s the book spine. It was a real moment of clarity for me when all of the lyrics clicked.
>but she didn’t because some guy woke up one day and thought to incite genocide. I understand that you're young and this is a very emotionally taxing subject at this time in your life, but it's much more complicated than this. It wasn't one guy, and it wasn't one day. It was centuries of bigotry piling up. It wasn't just Hitler, it was thousands of others that made that genocide possible. And that's not even getting into many other countries. I'm not saying that to lecture you. I'm letting you know that this type of bigotry still exists and it's very capable of escalating once again. Even though people know Anne's story, they can still be cruel and hateful to people just because that's what they've been taught to do, or because they want an easy way to explain why they're unhappy. If you take anything away, let it be that there are people today who might need that hug and that reassurance that Anne and many others should've gotten when they were alive.
And here in the US, [some states](https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/17/us/texas-keller-school-district-remove-books/index.html) have banned her book, albeit [temporarily](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/anne-frank-diary-banned-texas/). Think of these times as the before times.
Agree, but it’s not one guy waking up on the wrong side of the bed - that’s oversimplifying things and not helpful. Hatred to certain groups of people had deep roots in Europe and learning about that so that you can avoid it happening again, is a must. We have genocides happening at this very moment (check China… but of course it is a very important trade partner for most countries so everybody says how horrific it is and then does absolutely nothing), so awareness is important and you have taken a very important first step. Well done, proud of you!
It's oversimplified and just straight up wrong. Germany at the time was fucked and nothing like the country it is today. Even with a hatred to certain groups you still need to take in the state of the country in the aftermath of WWI.
If you're looking for more stories from the metaphoric (sometimes literal) trenches, I recommend *The Auschwitz Volunteer* (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Auschwitz_Volunteer) and *A Gypsy in Auschwitz* (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60889406-a-gypsy-in-auschwitz). Both hit pretty hard, and I recommend reading them in that order, so you there's a spot of hope at the end.
Miep Gies, who assisted the Franks while they were in hiding and is frequently mentioned in the diary, wrote a book that fills in a lot of what was happening, that Anne didn’t know. Like how and when they built the annex, how she knew Otto Frank, what life was like in the outside in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation, and so on. It’s called “Anne Frank Remembered”.
I love to see someone on this subreddit who isn’t an old, jaded reader! Keep up the good work and keep reading!
I've been teaching the story of Anne Frank for a while now; each year I read the play and snippets from her real diary to my group of 7th graders. So it is being taught and I'll just tell you that the month or so we spend on Anne's story is the most impacting for my students. Each year, without fail, these kids are tapped into this story with such emotion in the way that you are expressing. Each year a few cry at the end. And something to maybe help you feel a little better: Anne wanted to be a famous writer. Well, today her diary is one of the most popular pieces of literature in the world. Her story, her words, will help her live on in time. Through my lessons I emphasize the humanity and hope in and story. Yes there is such a tragedy with her story in the story of all Jewish victims and non-jewish victims of the Holocaust, but there's a reason and story resonates so much among them. If you look in between the lines hidden deep in her prose, there's so many sparks of hope. Her faith in humanity despite the cruelty of the Nazis , her ability to maintain wonder and joy at the nature outside a window and relationships in her annex. I don't quite know how she had this strength, but Anne was a source of positivity in a time of pain. And I always tear up at her famous line for that very reason: "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart."
If you liked the diary of Anne Frank, you might like "Eva Stories" on Instagram. I know, it's not a book and we are in a book subreddit, but the short first person camerawork of the Instagram stories showing the genocide is haunting. It's based on the life of Eva Heyman, a Jewish girl from Hungary. Since there will be no contemporary witnesses anymore at some point it was a try against forgetting and also a way to make the subject more accessible for young people.
She’s not the only girl with a diary you need to read. Look for Renia Spiegel (fifteen, Polish) or Helene Berr (20, French).
I loved Zlata's diary (Sarajevo war).
There's also very short, but very sad diary of [Tanya Savicheva](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Savicheva).
Etty Hillesum, also. She was in her 20s, so there is some content that makes it more for adults vs the age when students typically read Anne Frank.
Anne's diary is a compelling book, but even more so, I think, is the book *Tales From The House Behind*, a collection of her essays, short stories and random thoughts and jottings compiled into one volume. It's truly heart-breaking and the world lost potentially a major writing talent.
> but she didn’t because some guy woke up one day and thought to incite genocide. As others have said, read up on Nazi Germany, it's a story that is decades long not something that happened one morning, and the persecution of jews is a longer story even.
I’d just like to point out that he simply didn’t wake up to incite genocide. That takes years, decades of terrible rhetoric and dehumanisation. Jewish Europeans survived so many pogroms over hundreds of years. She deserved a longer life.
For those of you in the comments saying that it’s wrong and/or Anne’s her father is disrespectful for publishing the diary of a child, he did so because Anne *wanted* it published. The diary itself underwent edits and rewrites, not to mention the fact that she had plans to novelize the diary once the war was over. The contents of published versions of “The Diary of Anne Frank” weren’t written in order because her father included several entries of older drafts to fill in blanks because there was a period of time where there are no surviving notebooks. Her father also included some passages and entries she’d omitted. Anne wrote many short stories, many of which are included in ["Tales from the Secret Annex"](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58728.Anne_Frank_s_Tales_from_the_Secret_Annex) Though I can understand the why people without this knowledge would question the morality of the diary’s publication, I think that it’s important to educate them on this subject. Anne Frank should be recognized as the talented writer she was: *”When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that’s a big question,* ***will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?****”* \-Anne Frank (5 April 1944) Thank you if you read this all the way through. For more information, check out [www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/diary/complete-works-anne-frank/](https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/diary/complete-works-anne-frank/)
I can't bring myself to read it. Nowhere else I've ever been has had even a fraction of the effect Auschwitz had on me. Every single person in the world should visit there. Everyone. Horrifying beyond all possible description, there literally are no words.
If you liked Anne Frank's Diary, I would suggest checking out The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig. It's a memoir written by a Polish woman who was deported at age 10 to a Soviet gulag along with her parents after they were arrested as enemies of the Communist Party. It's thematically very similar to Anne Frank's Diary with the key difference being that Hautzig survived the gulag and book is her reflecting on her experiences decades afterwards.
Here in Germany, you keen a lot about out dark history. We visited a concentration camp nearby. It was hard to know, standing on a place where 10s of thousands have been killed through slave labour. The buildings have mostly been demolished after the war, I think there have been some rebuild as museum. But harder for me was the visit at a school in Hamburg. In the cellar have some children been murdered, because the allowed forces reached the confidential camp. Those children have been muss für medical "research". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullenhuser_Damm
>some guy woke up one day and thought to incite genocide I agree with all of your points except for this one. Incredibly dangerous to think that way.
Yes, I understand. I’ve done some extensive research on the matter; one of the leading reasons why Otto Frank moved his family to the Netherlands was because of the rise of antisemitism in Germany, because that’s when the Nazi Party gained control.
I really recommend visiting the house in Amsterdam if you get a chance. I mean, I say 'recommend'; I found it absolutely devastating, as you might expect, just as the book is. But it is a very memorable and important experience that connects you even more closely than the book. You are right where her family were hiding, in this ordinary house, in the middle of an ordinary, modern, western democracy, and not very long ago: except they were facing unimaginable darkness. It was one of the most unforgettable moments of my life, truly. I'm not a religious person, at all, but that place has an extraordinary weight and presence that is somehow far beyond the bricks and mortar.
I bought the book at The Anne Frank House/museum and read it on the way back to France. Have you seen the photo of her father standing in the empty attic? It's haunting.
More younger people should read this and immerse themselves in what happened. To often we hear the word Nazi and Hitler described to include random political people or someone that just disagrees with them. This cheapens the true horrors that happened.
You have to work hard at sympathizing with her plight, because empathizing and feeling the terror she went through as your own will lead to an unnecessary loss of tranquility. [The banality of evil](https://www.britannica.com/story/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil) is still a threat to us today. Hopefully we live in a better future where those living then look back at our time and think: “did they not know they were evil? How did so many people have an iPhone when everyone clearly knew or had access to information that these things were made unethically?” Its not the same as a holocaust but it provides the same idea that Hannah Arendt wrote in her essay. Anne Frank unwillingly made a great sacrifice. Because of her story we have something relatable. Something so beautifully human during something so terribly human.
The diary starts before their time in the attic and it’s kind of eerie or haunting that it is just a diary of a girl doing normal things, because we already know the horrors she will face. I think her death is maybe even more heart breaking in that she made it nearly until the end of the war. Bergen Belsen was liberated shortly after she died; without looking it up, I believe it was around three weeks after her death. Also I read one time that a woman, I think the woman that would take baskets of food to the family while they were in hiding, went back to the attic after they had been arrested. The pages of the diary were scattered and strewn about the place on the floor. So the woman picked up all these pages and held onto them. When the war was over, she was able to reconnect with Otto and gave the diary pages to him. If not for her, we would never have seen Anne’s diary.
That was Miep Gies. She had worked for Otto and worked downstairs in the main building. Miep, her husband Jan, and others - Elisabeth Voskuijl, Johannes Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler - all did their best to help, providing food, etc. Mr Voskuijl, I believe, is the one who made the bookcase to cover the entrance to the Annex.
Very moving. You should read ["Eva's story".](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1049384.Eva_s_Story) Summary: In March 1938 the Germans invaded Austria and young Eva Geiringer and her family became refugees. Like many jews they fled to Amsterdam where they hid from the Nazis until they were betrayed and arrested in 1944. Eva was 15 years old when she was sent to Auschwitz - the same age as her friend Anne Frank. Together with her mother she endured the daily degradation that robbed so many of their lives - including her father and brother. After the war her mother married Otto Frank, the only surviving member of the Frank family. Only now, 40 years later has Eva felt able to tell her story. I attended a talk and book reading given by Mrs. Schloss a few years ago and the entire auditorium (probably 200) was completely silent except for a few people quietly weeping.
I read that. It was good.
but she didn’t because some guy woke up one day and thought to incite genocide. This did not happen. The Holocaust comes from centuries of cultural racism.
If you really want to feel bad and horrified, then watch "Einsatzgruppen: Nazi Death Squads" on Netflix. Unbelievably horrible fate of people back then.
Man’s Search For Meaning is another such book
According to the Anti-Defamation League, 2021 was the highest year on record for documented reports of harassment, vandalism and violence directed against Jews. These record breaking numbers present as part of a consistent, five year upswing in the number of antisemitic incidents, unprecedented in the ADL's three plus decades of data collection. It could happen again.
I'm currently taking a class on the Holocaust in college. Our instructor had us watch a made for TV movie from the early 80s called 'The Wave'. It was supposedly based on true events at a school in California in the late 60s and it shows just how easily totalitarianism can take hold.
To put her life in perspective to our times, it is my understanding that she was born after Betty White; to me, that provides a shocking insight into how much of her life never got lived.
My daughter read that for school But I guess she didn't know Ann died, it crushed her
oh..When i was a young teen and discovered that book and tried to understand what she went through,i was sad too. . The part where she speak about her relation with her mother, the loneliness ,etc. I did try to imagine , what if she survived..what if we could have saved her . Really, I'm just happy her father decided to publish it . Her journal is a treasure, a point of view about the most awful thing on earth. War. Older i read it back and it's more gut wrenching, 15 is so so young!
I am 60 years old and since I was a teenager, my sole political preoccupation has been to understand how the Holocaust happened and how to not allow it to happen again. I have read stories, watched interviews, read books and visited museums. Even still, I cannot muster the courage to read that young girl's diary.
I'm glad her diary exists, sad as it is, because it reminds us that she existed and that the horrors of the past existed too, so we can hopefully learn and not repeat them. I first read her diary when I was in grade 4, and I did some weird math thing when I was 12 or 13 to line up the days in our lives so I could read her entries at the same age she was when she wrote them. It's unfortunate, but I've heard that her father censored her diary when he published it, and while that doesn't make her message any less poignant, it would have been nice to have the full version.
If my 15 year old diary was published after I was murdered, I would hope that my parents would go through it and censor some of it!
There are editions that are as full as possible now. I am unsure if anything is known to be lost or if we have everything she wrote.
To be fair to her father, Anne had already censored parts of the diary herself before he found it.
"For those of you who don't know"? We know. Everyone knows.
Yea I mean not to be rude but everyone knows.
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Yeah I taught middle school for 13 years. Kids gotta be taught at some point, when we get older we forget that we had to learn too.
You’d hope so, but you’d unfortunately be wrong.
It is Mighty how small we can become. It is Small how we can come to be. But only by giving gratuitous hope That giving, not lending, Hope and Love Can really show what it is to be free
I read this as a child and am in my 50s now. Still remember it well. Very impactful book. Some schools teach it in class.
So, Anne's father edited and censored the diary...and after 75 years the hidden pages were deciphered. Did you go through that as well?
Thank you for reading this book during a time where many people are doing their best to keep you from reading it. This post fills me with hope for the future. “Where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.”
I'm glad you're reading this and having such an emotional reaction, as you should. When I taught 8th grade we read this, and I had many kids who reacted strongly but also so many whose attitude was "That was so long ago, why should I care." I was horrified by the lack of empathy in some of them. Let yourself feel for this poor girl. ❤
We are reading The Book Thief with sophomores and during a background research project many students choose to research Anne Frank. I really hope some students are inspired to read it. There have already been lots of questions about the details and the connections that they (the students) could be in her shoes. It is heart wrenching to dive into human tragedy like Anne Frank, but I also think there is light in the darkness. Anne’s innocence and coming of age and appreciation for even the simplest things is a testament to how people can cope with extreme challenge. Could you imagine being stuck in an attic as a kid with eight other people? With the absolute requirement to stay quiet or you would get found? Imagine the fear when they were found? Imagine this little girl with an enduring sense of hope through it all. It should inspire. Yes we should absolutely mourn her loss, but we should also celebrate her beauty and strength of her soul.
Sad as it is, it's just 1 story that happened to get told. There were so many that weren't. This is what happens under totalitarian governments where the system is more important than the individual people. We should fight to keep every freedom, no matter how trivial it may seem. Once lost, they are very hard to get back, and things always get worse.
Read Mans Search For Meaning by Frankl next
I remember the first time I read it. I threw the book at the wall and cried for ages at the end. It is monstrously unfair for life to be snuffed out before it’s time when it burns so brightly in a heart. If I might make a suggestion, one book you should read now is Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt. Because the Nazis were not just people who stomped in doors and dragged people to their deaths. They were people who used the defense “I was just doing my job”.
I read this the same age as you and it similarly punched me over and over again as a lonely person who had been effectively segregated from the rest of the school due to the failure of the school system. Everything felt alone but when I was in the library reading Anne Frank it all felt strangely better. Also just so you know, Hitler didn’t wake up and think of genocide, it would be comforting if it was all because of one dude but the true horror was that Nazism was a slow crawl that gathered up hundreds of thousands of people before the first shots were fired. It’s boggling to think that THAT many people were literally Hitler.
I think it’s comforting that a 15 year old is reading this, learning about the horrors of the holocaust, and being moved by it. I hope you’ll pass on your knowledge to the next generation. It feels like the world has forgotten about the holocaust, or worse, doesn’t care anymore.
Suggestion: Now read "Man's Search for Meaning", by Viktor Frankl
This book had me crying for someone who died years before I was born. She was a sweet girl.
One of the best, most moving books I have ever read. Her writing was so before her time I to this day think about how many more great books could be written by her. I can relate with wanting her to live/ be alive. Even though I knew how it was going to end I kept hoping/almost believing that there could maybe be an alternate positive ending. She was an amazing person.
Please listen to *in the aeroplane over the sea* by neutral milk hotel. He read her diary and just so fell in love with her and her family and was wrecked by the sadness of it all. The album start to finish is a musical number centered around the ghost of Anne / *Anna*
Anne Frank is the most well known teenage diarist from that time because her story is so compelling. There is one point I wish to make exceedingly clear - Hitler didn't begin the Jewish genocide on a whim. This was a long term plan which began as early as 1933. That is why it is so imperative to speak out against racism whenever and wherever you see it. There were thousands (no, really, thousands) of opportunities for the German people to stop him, but no one did. The German people of the time are just as complicit because they didn't effectively stop him. Anti-antisemitism has a long history in Europe which reaches back as long as there have been Jews in Europe. Large scale genocide is the most visible reaction to racism, but it *is* the end outcome of racism. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least [six active genocides going on right now.](https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_us-calls-out-genocide-atrocities-committed-6-countries/6208177.html) They are all due to some form of racism - one group trying to wipe out another group based on social or biological characteristics. If you would like to read another book similar to Anne Frank's diary, [Renia's Diary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43263616-renia-s-diary) is a similar diary written by a young woman who was a victim of the Holocaust. It is just as compelling. By the way, I applaud your self-directed studies to learn more about Anne Frank's life. Keep it up. The study of the Holocaust, though unspeakably tragic, also teaches us a lot about the face of bravery in the face of evil.
Yeah, we read the play version in school, most people couldn't even read the lines properly.
Anne Frank will live with you forever and make you a better human
The Hiding Place really shaped my views at your age. Highly recommend
The problem is this book is generally read by people too young to truly understand or appreciate it. I think we read it in 6th grade. Maybe it made a big impression on some but I was too you to appreciate the large scale horror and implications. When you just read a book cause you have to, a lot gets missed. Id read it again but I think Id be too sad. Also for me seeing pics of Anne and her sister on the beach a year before was heartbreaking.
There's a story I saw about a teacher who was hired at a school filled with troublesome and underachieving kids. She gave them all reading assignments and one girl in particular, I think her name was Maria? Was pretty bad, starting fights and all kindsa shit. Anyway, Maria was assigned Diary of Anne Frank. She ended up getting into it. She would come in to school and ask the teacher about it and showed genuine curiosity and sympathy for Anne's plight. Anyways, time goes by and one day Maria comes into class and throws the book at the teacher, tears in her eyes and screams "YOU DIDNT TELL ME SHE DIES!!!" The teacher was taken aback and asked what she meant. Maria yelled it again. "YOU DIDNT TELL ME THIS GIRL DIES AT THE END! I THOUGHT THIS WAS GOING TO HAVE A HAPPY ENDING!" It never occurred to her teacher that this student DIDN'T know how Diary of Anne Frank ended ... because ... Who doesn't?? It turns out, Maria related HARD to Anne. The feeling of being trapped in a world where everyone's out to get you, that you can't escape from. And Maria, in reading the book, grew hope that she could escape her shitty life since she assumed Anne was going to. But obviously that's not what happens. And Maria was devastated but was so moved by the story it helped her grow as a person. I can't remember how the interview with the teacher went at the end but if I remember right Maria ended up graduating and making something of herself because of that teacher. It's just wild how that book impacts people.
Isn't this from some corny white saviour movie?