Lessons I need to learn from Anne Frank

Wesley Zinn
1 Comment »

I've titled this blog "Courage and Vulnerability", saying To be courageous requires vulnerability and to be vulnerable takes courage. But, what do I know...

Yesterday Pam and I toured the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. All was pretty nice until it got to the point where they described her capture and being dragged off to the camp. I seem to have forgotten that part of her story. THEN, I learned that she died a month before the end of the war and her opportunity for release and freedom. All of a sudden my whole spirit changed. The secret hiding place I was standing in, the story I was intersecting, my perspective, my emotions all changed in an instant. I'm not sure what I became, but I knew I was no longer a tourist.

Courage and Vulnerability. What do I know about that...

When I get home I'm going to read The Diary of Anne Frank. Maybe I can learn something.

1 comments:

Linda said...

I read the Diary of Anne Frank many years ago. This book was seared into my consciousness, along with photos of mass graves and stories of the atrocities that occurred in concentration and extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank eventually died. My Jewish parents impressed upon me the need to pass on the truth of all this, so that future generations would honor the memories of those who died, and so that nothing like this would ever happen again. In Jewish newspapers and literature, in synagogues and B'nai B'rith meetings, and anywhere Jews of my generation congregated, we were constantly reminded: "We must never forget!" How could this possibly slip our minds, I would wonder. How could the world forget about six million Jews (and five million others) who were subjected to forced labor, inhuman living conditions, starvation, medical experimentation, and systematic rape and torture? It seemed impossible that history could ever be so arbitrarily revised and redefined. And yet, that is exactly what is in danger of happening. The recent movement to deny the veracity of the holocaust is an outrage and an affront to all humanity. If we do not learn to recognize evil and take appropriate measures to eradicate it, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Anne Frank's voice continues to call out over the decades, reminding us of what we lost...and what we cannot ever lose again.

May 5, 2011 at 11:03 PM

Post a Comment