“I can always write for myself. But I want to achieve more than that. I can’t imagine having to live like Mother, Mrs. van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me!”

The “worst case scenario” in our minds has always been the Holocaust – the mass murder of an entire group of people based on national, ethnical, racial, or religious identity. This historic event is the benchmark for assessing how cruel our state regimes actually are. The goal: to ensure that “the worst” does not happen again.

The Holocaust is often thought of as a contained blip in the timeline of human history — a tragic event with a clear beginning and end. However, genocides do not happen suddenly without warning. It starts with a low-burning resentment and often some reference to the recent or distant past. An agent, whether a leader or a set of specific circumstances, stirs up these feelings and weaponizes them against a group of people. The messages are a critical hit. Gradually, actions against the group escalate in severity until the inertia of it all acts of its own and wipes everything in its path.

“Mother is always asking me who I’m going to marry when I grow up, but I bet she’ll never guess it’s Peter, because I talked her out of that idea myself, without batting an
eyelash. I love Peter as I’ve never loved anyone, and I tell myself he’s only going around with all those other girls to hide his feelings for me.”

Anne Frank is a stark reminder that extreme prejudice is all-consuming and indiscriminate. It does not care for children, idealists or the innocent. It can kill a girl with pure ambitions and a big heart. She was a sister, daughter, or cousin. Someone’s crush. It could have been me. It could have been you.

The sprawling notebook with its pasted photos and worn-in pages is a reminder of the rawness of evil. The blindingly loud bombs that terrorized the Franks and the Van Daans. Resorting to scraps of paper and a wastepaper basket to avoid making noises in approaching the bathroom. Smelling your own feces on your hands and all around you as you pray not to get caught and deported to a concentration camp.

Annelise Marie was ultimately a political refugee. She was German-born and was brought to the Netherlands in 1934 when she was four years old. In other words, an immigrant. Her citizenship, along with other German Jews, was revoked in 1941, when she was 12 years old. Although the Netherlands was the only country she ever really knew, she never obtained citizenship. She died an undocumented immigrant - in the broadest and most acute sense.

History has a way of changing the details but keeping the storyline the same. It is a lesson that we still have yet to learn and overcome. To let hate go unchallenged and unquestioned is to comply.

We are better than this.