Anne Frank's Story Still Resonates Today

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!

Review: Oppenheimer

The film is based in a biography of the theoretical physicist

Just watched the film Oppenheimer and it was quite intense, but a cinematic triumph for director Christopher Nolan, featuring an all-star cast bringing to life the complex life and person of J Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb.

The three-hour film is an adaptation of the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin and Nolan wrote the screenplay. As a result Oppenheimer is a pretty accurate portrayal of the historical events that happened, following the American theoretical physicist as he studies quantum physics in England and Germany, brings the subject back to the United States, and then gets recruited to become the director of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Einstein was a contemporary of Oppenheimer

He brings together a team of scientists to create the atomic bomb, but as they are building it, Hitler has died, and the motivation to stop the Nazis has evaporated. But Oppenheimer believes the Japanese need to be stopped and the project continues. Once the test code named Trinity is a success, the US Army moves in to take the bomb plans to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 respectively, effectively stopping the Japanese.

However, Oppenheimer is not a straight-forward all-American patriot, especially not during the McCarthy era. And this is what makes the film a complex portrayal of the man. While it is not definitive that he was a card-carrying communist, he tried to help Jewish scientists flee the Nazis, supported the Spanish civil war, tried to unionize professors. It perhaps didn't help Oppenheimer that his brother and wife were active communists.

The film also shows his complicated personal life, how he had a passionate affair with Jean Tatlock, but she broke up with him; he soon met his future wife Katherine "Kitty" Puening, who was with her third husband, also Oppenheimer's colleague.

He had an intense relationship with Tatlock

Later Oppenheimer rekindled his relationship with Tatlock while he was married with his first child, but ended it -- she later committed suicide, which affected him profoundly. He also later had an affair with Ruth Tolman, also the wife of Oppenheimer's friend.

In one scene Kitty is seen drunk and unable to care for their son and Oppenheimer takes the baby to his friend to look after him "for a while"... one wonders if he son experienced abandonment issues. Oppenheimer and Kitty later had a daughter.

After the Trinity test, Oppenheimer realises how the atomic bomb will impact humanity and tries to tell the US government it has to stop what will begin as the arms race in the Cold War. 

Another character in the film is Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission who wants to be confirmed for Secretary of Commerce. Strauss is personally offended when Oppenheimer humiliates him publicly dismissing concerns about exporting radioisotopes. As a result Strauss orchestrates an elaborate plan to silence Oppenheimer with a closed-door hearing to decide whether the scientist should have his security clearance.

Black and white scenes show historical events

The questioning is intense and harsh, making it hard for Oppenheimer to defend himself effectively, but also reveals his character of being unable or unwilling to fight back, and his trusted colleagues and wife have to do it for him.

The cinematography of Oppenheimer shows calculated shots, and apparently no computer-generated images were used, particularly when it came to the Trinity test. Cillian Murphy as the physicist ages gracefully throughout the film, his big blue eyes are very intense and full of emotion. He is in almost all the scenes.

It was only after watching the film did a friend tell me that the scenes in colour were the story through Oppenheimer's eyes, while those in black and white were events as viewed in history.

Meanwhile the costumes were fantastic, bringing back sharp suits with high-waisted trousers, broad-rimmed porkpie hat. There was also a lot of smoking going on and Oppenheimer has a cigarette lit most of the time; is it surprising he died of throat cancer at the age of 62 in 1967?

Oppenheimer is a complex portrait of the man, how he was not just into physics, but was well read, faced moral issues with regards to humanity and was loyal to his colleagues. Should he have invented the atomic bomb? He was proud of his achievement, but saddened that it resulted in ratcheted tensions with the Soviet Union.

Oppenheimer

Directed by Christopher Nolan

180 minutes