Nothing about picnic preparation....
Perhaps it is the lingering effects of my subject matter yesterday (terror) that have me thinking of her today.
Anne Frank.
When I think of terror, (and by terror I mean not only the fear of sudden violent death, but the more abject fear of living... fear of breathing too loud) I guess that my mind turns most readily to accounts of the Holocaust era and to specific stories I have read of what it was that human beings were forced to endure throughout those years.
Anne Frank needs no introduction. If you do not know who Anne Frank is.... I would ask you, “Who is reading this sentence to you?” Surely anyone who can read has either read her, or read of her.
I have done both. The two books of her own authorship are The Diary of A Young Girl and Tales From The Secret Annex. Each book illustrates not only how Nazi terrorism traumatized the life of this young girl, but also how her spirit overcame it.
It was exactly seventy-three years ago yesterday, (July 9th, 1942) that the Frank family, along with another family, the Van Pels (later, Fritz Pfefer joined them) entered their hiding place in what became known as the Secret Annex. It was located at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam Holland, in an empty section of the building owned by Otto Frank's company. [Otto is Anne’s father]. While business continues as usual in the lower part of the building, there are a total of eight people hiding, day and night, in this annex above. Before too long, the entrance to the Secret Annex is concealed behind a movable bookcase. Anne writes: “Now our Secret Annex has truly become secret… Mr. Kugler thought it would be better to have a bookcase built in front of the entrance to our hiding place. It swings out on its hinges and opens like a door."
[The people in hiding are helped by Otto Frank’s four employees: Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler and Bep Voskuijl. They arrange the food supplies, clothing, books, and all sorts of other necessities. In addition, they keep the people in hiding up-to-date with the news from Amsterdam and beyond].
The Frank family [Dutch Jewish] had planned to enter the Annex on July 16th, but “call-ups” had meant that they had to enter seven days earlier. Germany was at the height of its conquests. Without the immediate refuge of the hiding place, the Franks would have been summarily hunted down and transported to their deaths!
And so it is that I pause to think of them today, July 10th, 2005. Exactly seventy-three years ago, they awoke to their first day of life in the Annex.
When Anne Frank opened her eyes to her new world that morning, she did not see scratchy black and white images. Things were very much in color. Red was red. Green was green. Her hairbrush, having a pink handle, was still pink. This was not something being clattered out on a newsreel. She was not yet a part of history. She was a young girl full of life and dreams and hope, now mingled with foreboding and terror.
If she were to look out upon the street through a small hint of window, she would not see a bland and dismal panel of generic greyness bordered with trees made entirely of black twigs. These are our images, painted colorless upon the past. No, Anne would see life as usual. Vibrant birds flying past the window, and things going on without her. If an Aryan-approved girl walked by, she may have been talking to a doll that had yellow ribbons in her hair.
Anne writes: "Not being able to go outside upsets me more than I can say, and I'm terrified our hiding place will be discovered and that we'll be shot. "
Twenty-eight months they spent in such seclusion and fear.
Then, on the morning of August 4, 1944, a car pulled up at 263 Prinsengracht.
Several figures stepped from the car, again, in techni-color, no newsreel.
One was an SS sergeant, Karl Josef Silberbauer, in full uniform, and with him, at least three Dutch members of the Security Police, armed but in civilian clothes.
Those in the Annex had been betrayed. Kugler himself was forced to pull back the bookcase and lead the police to the terrified eight.
Otto Frank describes what happened at this point:
“It was around ten-thirty. I was upstairs with the Van Pelses in Peter’s room and I was helping him with his schoolwork. I was showing him the mistake in the dictation when suddenly someone came running up the stairs. The stairs were squeaking, I stood up, because it was still early in the morning and everyone was supposed to be quiet - then the door opened and a man was standing right in front of us with a gun in his hand and it was pointed at us.”
The eight people in the Annex were arrested, as well as two of their helpers, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman. The “authorities” were sure to also round up all of the valuables and cash they could find.
All of the valuables, that is, except Anne’s diary, which lay strewn on the floor, and was later retrieved by two of the helpers left behind.
Anne and her sister Margot were transported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, and then later, transferred to Bergen-Belsen. A typhus epidemic in the winter of 1944-’45 killed thousands of prisoners, including Margot, and a few days later, Anne. The bodies of both girls were probably dumped in Bergen-Belsen’s mass graves.
Otto Frank was the only one of the eight to survive the concentration camps. Until his death in August of 1980, he devoted himself to sharing the message of Anne’s diary with people all over the world.
If things had been otherwise, Anne Frank may have just celebrated her eighty-sixth birthday a few weeks ago. Because things were as they were, she never celebrated her sixteenth.
I think of the Franks today because I choose to.
And because it is important, very important to remember important things.
That is all.
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