Media

Yom HaShoah Remarks
Georgia State House

April 28th, 2023

Today we remember the victims of the Holocaust; we honor the survivors and thank the liberators, the rescuers, the helpers. We reflect on this tragedy of unimaginable scale, this assault on human decency, this crime so extreme that it needed to have its own name.

We struggle, and we fail, to understand how human beings could do this to one another. We grieve the loss of human life, the suffering of those who lost children, parents, entire families, communities, worlds.

We remember Anne Frank, one of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, one of a million and a half children claimed by Nazi crimes. The Nazis created a nightmarish reality on the basis of absurd fantasies about Jews, marrying the centuries-old, religiously-motivated anti-semitism with delusional racial theories, applying a warped Social Darwinist kill-or-be-killed vision to these supposed racial categories with industrial efficiency. Anne Frank. I am speaking of Annelies Marie Frank, the daughter of Edith and Otto, sister of Margot Frank, author of the famous diary.

But we could reasonably ask, when we say we remember Anne Frank, which one? For Annelies Marie was not the only Anne Frank to perish in the Holocaust. She was not the only Anne Frank from the Netherlands to perish in the Holocaust.

The Dutch have produced a volume with the names of 102,000 known Dutch Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It is as thick as a phone book, something our 13-year olds today wouldn't even recognize. And it would take 60 volumes that size to capture the scale of the crime that stole her life.

Enough to fill the entire hinged bookshelf that concealed Anne's hiding place from those who sought to kill her. Annelies Marie Frank was not even the only Anne Frank from the Netherlands who turned 13 years of age in the 1942 to be murdered in the Holocaust.

When I visited Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem this fall, I found the names of more than 40 women and girls with the family name Frank and the first name, Ann, Anna, or another variation from all over Europe. From the Netherlands, Romania, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Greece, Ukraine, there were Anne Franks whom no one still living remembers today. They spoke the many languages of Europe, Yiddish included; some were Orthodox and others less observant; they were diverse in their cultures, beliefs, practices and languages. Many, if they met, had no common language to communicate with one another. Today, we remember them all.

And Annelies Marie Frank... Annelies Marie Frank was just getting started! Just 15 years old when she was captured, she would not see her sixteenth birthday. Yet she had already been keeping a private Diary, and then she was inspired to start writing a version she could share with others, and not just herself. The Diary is a thick volume, but includes just 50,000 words of the 140,000 she wrote in hiding. She kept a book of beautiful sentences. She wrote short stories. And she was just getting started. Anne's older sister Margot kept a diary too, but it has been lost.

What if, we wonder, what if Anne had survived? What if she was alive today and kept writing her Diary at that rate? Her chronicle of the last eight decades would fill another 40 volumes; it would fill a book shelf. I picture Anne's diary alone on a long bookshelf that should be full.

The empty bookshelf symbolizes the profound loss of human potential that the Holocaust represents, the unfinished chapters of people unfree to write their own endings.

Anne had the opportunity to write her Diary because brave people put their lives on the line to hide, feed, and protect them. We celebrate these heroes, these upstanders, as well we should. They were the righteous among nations. But there were not enough of them to keep six million Jews from being murdered.

We celebrate the heroes, but recognize that we can never rely on heroic individuals alone. Yet it is frightening to be an upstander on our own. Perhaps that's part of the reason that so many people did nothing. So many good people did nothing. In a crime of this scale, the perpetrators, those responsible for the crimes and those that supported them, may number in the millions. But they are dwarfed by the tens of millions who did not act, who did not help.

Most of us can relate to a situation where we wish we had acted, but did not. Perhaps we were frightened, or did not understand what was happening. Perhaps we simply did not know what to do–we felt powerless, or hopeless. This is where we continue to marvel at the wisdom of the young woman who wrote the Diary. Hiding for her life, she dreamed of being able to go out and work for mankind. Confronted with a genocidal regime, she fiercely refused to cave in to despair, and despite all she knew, affirmed the general goodness of humanity.

We have learned that humanity is capable of the most terrible things. But that cruelty must be built, cultivated, learned, organized, set into motion. Rabbi Hesh Epstein observed that we have struggled for decades with the question, where was g-d in the camps? Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question—perhaps g-d has been asking us, where was your humanity?

With the Anne Frank House, we work with students to remember the past, the reflect on its meaning for us today, and to respond in the present, so we can together build the kind of world where every Anne Frank can live to her full potential. And we return to the reflections of Anne Frank, because, despite everything, she held on to hope. Today, let us recall that to remember, and to hope, are not passive things that happen in our minds; they are not simply feelings we have. They are actions, responsibilities, that we must fulfill every day. Hope is not naive optimism. It is the clear knowledge that we can take meaningful action, and the moral clarity to recognize that we must. When everything in the world appeared just the opposite, Anne was still able to write, “Isn’t it wonderful, that no one need wait a single moment to begin to change the world for the better?” What an achievement, just to be able to conceive such a thought, when you are hiding for your very life. I believe that Anne's hope saved Otto after the Holocaust. Otto had lost everything, and everyone, a trauma I hope few of us can relate to. He endured the trenches of WWI, and was liberated from Auschwitz. He had seen the worst of humanity.

Yet when he read his daughter's words, he knew the world needed them. When their hiding place was preserved, he insisted it not just be a memorial to the murdered—it had to be a living institution to bring young people together and to help them understand one another.

Otto spoke with a beautiful simplicity.

"No one wants war, he told us. But as long as we don't know one another, there will be conflicts. Whether we are black, white or yellow, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim or Jewish, we have to live in one world, and though we may be different, we can learn that we can get along very nicely."

Otto dedicated the rest of his life to this mission, and we take his words to heart. We need not just history lessons, he said, we need the lessons of history.

Anne's Diary shows us that young people's voices matter, and reminds us that however bleak things appear, we are capable of doing good for this world.

When a distressed young American woman cried out in despair in a letter to Otto Frank, following the assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy, asking how he could possibly have hope when she had none, Otto replied:

"Even if I thought the world was going to end tomorrow, I would plant a tree today."

And he did. He had two trees planted in Israel in honor of Cara Wilson-Granat, who needed hope that day. Those trees are more than 50 years old now, and although Anne never got to sit in the shade of her beloved chestnut tree, somewhere in Israel children play freely under these trees, blissfully unaware that they are experiencing something Anne never could, but that was nevertheless inspired by her example. Those trees will long outlive us. When we remember the past, we plant that tree, an act of hope—that we may respond in the present to help build the kind of future that Anne and all of her fellow victims deserved.

~ Dr. Doyle Stevick, Executive Director
Anne Frank Center, Colombia,  SC