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| Thinking of Anne Frank on Holocaust Remembrance Day |
When I was in elementary school, my mother gave me a copy of The Dairy of a Young Girl and got to know Anne Frank this way, and was impressed by her deep, sophisticated, thoughtful observations and feelings at a young age. This was also how I got to learn about the horrors of the holocaust.
January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day and I just saw a traveling exhibition in a school in Vancouver called "Anne Frank: A History for Today."
Presented by Anne Frank House, there are several large panels that document what was happening in Europe in the 1930s with the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and how these big historical events coincided with those of the Frank family.
Anne was born on June 12, 1929 and had an older sister, Margot, her mother Edith, and father Otto. Anne writes that her father was 36 years old when he married her mother who was 25 in 1925.
The stock market crash in 1929 which led to the Great Depression resulted in growing unemployment, and Hitler of the Nazi party promised jobs, promoted antisemitism, and criticised communism. When his party was voted into power, Hitler began doing as he promised, and began making life difficult for Jews, attacking Jewish people and businesses in Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass.
Germans were told not to patronise Jewish businesses, or associate with them, and later Jews were forced to give up their businesses to the government. Nazis didn't like gypsies, Blacks or the disabled either.
The Franks were uneasy with the situation and in 1933 they moved to Amsterdam where Otto set up a company that sold spices and pectin to make jam.
But the Nazis weren't satisfied with just controlling Germany. In 1939 the Nazis invaded Poland and the following year entered the Netherlands, which surrendered in a week.
In the meantime Otto tried to apply for visas for the United States, Cuba and Britain, but they were either granted and he didn't receive it on time, or their applications were not approved. In July 1942 the family began living in the secret annex behind his office, which is where Anne recorded her innermost thoughts for two years, until they were suddenly arrested in August 1944.
Anne and her sister Margot died days of each other of typhus in a concentration camp, mother Edith died on the way to the camp, and Otto was the only survivor of the family, when he and others were liberated by the Soviets in January 1945.
Watching a documentary about the Franks and Nazism immediately drew parallels with the ICE raids in the United States, in particular what has happened in Minneapolis these last few weeks. Immigration Customs Enforcement agents are violently taking down and arresting who they think are illegal immigrants, detaining them and sending them out of the country.
They are doing President Donald Trump's bidding, as he claimed these undocumented people are violent drug dealers, rapists, pedophiles, murderers, gang members, and terrorists who need to be removed from the country.
The US Department of Homeland Security reports to have removed over 670,000 people, and over 2 million self-deportations.
Now two American citizens are dead after trying to protect these alleged criminals.
It is eerie and shocking to see how this is happening today just south of the border from us.
How is it that history is repeating itself in 2026!
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