u know as long as we are on the subject of holocaust remembrance day… everyone go read that smithsonian mag article on anne frank again 🙃
The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—is often called “inspiring,” by which we mean that it flatters us. It makes us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift, it is worth noting, at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” three weeks before she met people who weren’t.
Here’s how much some people dislike living Jews: They murdered six million of them.
Last February I visited Auschwitz with one of my roommates in our study abroad program, and the thing that stuck with me the most out of everything was this book I was paging through, tucked away in a side room in one of the buildings, and I really don’t remember the context of the book at all, I wish I did so I could find the real quote because I think about it all the time, but there was a quote in it from an interview with someone who had known Anne and her mother and sister while they were at the camp, and described her as someone who was just like, completely hollow and given up. Like she never spoke, her mom and sister would kind of try to keep up some kind of hope and she just didn’t at all. And I was just. I don’t know. It broke me a little bit, even more than all of the other horrifying things I read that day, because we only hear this one very specific story of her, and it was from Before. When there was still reason to believe that she’d be okay and that she’d get to have her life back someday. And nobody had ever told me that no, actually, she didn’t die still thinking the world was a good place, she died a broken empty shell of a person because she’d learned firsthand that it wasn’t. There was a bright and funny and optimistic girl who had all of that beaten out of her, right away, because that’s what nazis want and that’s what these camps did to every single one of the millions of people who went through them, they didn’t kill that brave and clever girl from the book, they ripped away everything that made her brave and clever and hopeful and anything like herself until she didn’t feel like a person anymore, and then they killed THAT girl (yeah I know it was disease, it counts either way) and I think we should learn that, too. It’s horrifying. It’s much harder to hear. But it’s important.
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u know as long as we are on the subject of holocaust remembrance day... everyone go read that smithsonian mag article on...
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