Posted by
Rix on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 12:54:01 PM
I was reading through the usual daily line up of news from the net when I saw an article about them finding a picture of a boy Anne Frank had written about. He was the love of her life. She was 11 and he was 13 when both of their families had to go into hiding. Although I have read Anne Frank's story, seen the play, the movie. etc. etc. for some reason it hit me really hard today. It might be because my own daughter is getting close to the age Anne was when she started her famous diary, or because I realized she was born the same year as my grandmother. Looking at her picture and the picture of her sweetheart brought me to tears this morning. They weren't just for Anne who died in a concentration camp at the young age of 16. The tears are also for her young man Peter, who died in Auschwitz , for her father, though he survived, and for all the children who were also there giving up their lives for no reason other than the whim of a mad man. For the life of me I can not see how anyone with any amount of humanity in them could cause, allow, or deny this holocaust. I worry how little impact this event has on my generation and fear it will have even less on the generation of my children. In a couple of years, when she is ready, I'll give my daughter a copy of the Diary of Anne Frank and read it with her. Then I will tell her of her great grandfather who liberated one of these "camps" and the things he saw, and I'll tell her of how her great grandmothers worked at home to support the war. Then maybe we'll watch The Sound of Music again with fresh eyes and read the real story of the VonTrapp family's flight to freedom.
What do you think we should do to keep these memories alive in a new generation?