We Must Remember

“Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness.” 

-Anne Frank

I read a statistic today that made me scared. It said that twenty-two percent of Millenials in America never learned about the Holocaust. It was in a article today because today is the day of rememberance of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. Even though the statistic scared me I wasn’t surprised. In high school we didn’t talk about World War II much in general. I remember my teacher saying that he would rather teach World War I because World War II was to “well known”. I only remember being taught about the beginnings of Nazi Germany and that was it. We didn’t talk about Nazi rhetoric, the ignorance, accpetance of intolerance, the stories of survivors, and the concentration camps. I didn’t hear about the Holocaust until I was in seventh grade. I remember overhearing someone talking about Anne Frank and how she had written a book. I bought the book without really knowing what it was about. On the back it said that it was about the Holocaust and I had to Google what the Holocaust was. After having minimal knowledge I started reading the book. I was Anne’s age when I stared reading it, thirteen years old. At the time my only exposure to people were different from me was through books. I had a lot in common with Anne, we were young girls, we read and wrote and we were dramatic. There seemed to be only one difference between us. 

She was Jewish.

In the books that I read the characters were either Christian or their faith was ambiguous. I fell in love with Anne though. She was dramatic, she felt misunderstood and she felt deeply. At the same time there was always this little thought in my head that wouldn’t go away.

“She’s not a Christian,” it would say. “She won’t go to heaven.”

I kept reading though and I fell more and more in love with her. There were so many moments when I could relate to something she said or felt the need to defend her when she got into arguments. She got yelled at because she read and talked back. I was inspired by her. Near the end of the book Anne says something along the lines of, “I still believe that people are good at heart.” I couldn’t believe that she could say that. She was living in an annex, with a bunch of others, during a never ending war. How could she possibly believe that? At that point I was convinced that Anne was going to make it. She was to good of a person to be captured or die. I didn’t know how the book ended though. I didn’t know that Anne, her family and everyone in the Annex would be caught by the Nazi’s. I didn’t know that Anne would die in Aushchwitz one or two months before liberation. I remember sitting in my room, getting closer to the end. I remember reading the last page of the diary and then turning it. It told me that Anne had been captured, she didn’t live. I started bawling. I had never had such a physical reaction to a book and I haven’t since. All I could think about how it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that Anne had to die. Anne had a life to live, books to write, a husband to marry and children to have. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. That’s was when I realized that the world isn’t always fair and good people don’t always make it to the end of a battle. I don’t know how long I sat there, thinking. I couldn’t imagine God sending Anne to hell. God couldn’t do that. I couldn’t imagine God sending a fifteen year old girl into hell because she was a Jew. Anne was a fifteen year old girl whose life was cut to short. I imagined her getting a hero’s welcome into heaven. 

Books make us see the world differently. I’ve only read the book once and I still think about it constantly. Every time I started to judge someone I thought of Anne. I thought about that one friend who wouldn’t be friends with her anymore because of her faith. I thought about all the things that made us similar. The book proved that when you take away labels, we’re not that different from each other. Anne is one of the reasons I decided to study to become a social worker. She’s the reason that when bigotry rises I become outraged. She’s the reason why I studied and read about Nazi rhetoric and how a Holocaust starts. She’s the reason that I keep reading books about the Holocaust. She’s the reason that whenever I’m in DC, I go to the Holocaust museum. 

This book is one of the few books that I’ll make my children read. Then I realized that my cousins are getting older and I can give them books to read. My one cousin is turning ten and the other is turning thirteen. I went on Amazon and bought a bunch of books for them. The Diary of Anne Frank was one of the first books that came to mind. I don’t know if they’ll have the same experience I did. My thirteen year old cousin may have already read it. Regardless, they will not be a part of that twenty-two percent. They will know what the Holocaust was. They will understand the importance of it and how it starts. They will speak up when hate rises and they will know that love is the strongest power there is. They won’t know this because I told them but because they read a book about a girl who wrote her story. I hope that she’ll change their lives the way that she changed mine.

My life was changed because a thirteen year old girl wrote her story.

My life was changed because a secretary and a father saw the importance of her story.

My life was changed by a girl who will forever be fifteen.

DFTBA

-AB