A Day of Remembering

I have often written about Anne Frank whom I discovered when I was in grade school— a skinny, parochial school kid in a plaid uniform with an envelope shaped hat on my head and single braid down my back. No matter that Anne was Jewish and I was not. No matter that she lived in a different time and a different place. Like Anne, I poured my heart into my diary. Like Anne I dreamed of being a writer. I mourned her death as if she were my dearest friend.

At one point in the diary Anne writes that that despite everything, she still believed people were good at heart. Even after I learned words like Kristallnacht and Auschwitz, I believed as Anne did. I believed that what happened to her and the six million who shared her fate was an aberration, an unspeakable aberration that would never be repeated. It is almost impossible for me to imagine that someone's hate could be stronger than their humanity. 

Decades after  reading Anne's diary, I was scanning the shelves at Barnes and Noble and  came across a book written by a friend of Anne's who was with her at Bergen-Belsen. Greatly weakened, dying from tuberculosis, Anne was still making plans for after the war when she might get her diary published. I could read only a few lines before I sat on the floor between the stacks at Barnes and Noble and cried— for Anne, for the millions who perished with her, for the hollow left by their absence. For hate strong enough to crush one's humanity.

Despite everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart, Anne wrote. 

What would Anne say if she had watched the news with me tonight? or last night or last week. last month. last year?  Across the world a brutal dictator marches into another country and destroys what he wants and cannot have. In our own country, there is outrageous gun violence. An 82 year old man is beaten with a hammer. There's a rise in antisemitism and crimes against the Asian community. Another black man is beaten to death by five police officers. 

I owe it to Anne to keep believing that goodness will prevail, to honor her with words in books and blogs that may help create the world  she believed existed.  Some days it is hard.