The ACES Museum for Black Veterans remembers Anne Frank and the Holocaust. SJ Dodgson MJoTA 2014 v8n1 p0429
Anne Frank was born in Germany in June 1929, was arrested for breathing while Jewish in Holland in 1944, and perished in northern Germany in the labor camp at Bergen-Belson in March 1945, only weeks before the camp was liberated and the truth of the camps displayed in the death chambers, mass graves and starving inmates.
She was 15 when she died, and her life during her lifetime and afterwards is known through the odd intersections of world events and timing that make up all lives.
In the 2 years before she was arrested in Holland, in Amsterdam, she lived with 7 others in a small part of a building. They were arrested 2 months after D-Day, when the Nazis were in retreat. Which was when the Nazis knew the genocide of Jews was now or never: at that time, the order came to get on a train to be transported for Ruth, the German grandmother of my younger children Allister (pictures on this page) and Patience.
Neither Ruth nor her son Lothar Blossfeld, nor her siblings and their children were on the train, which never arrived at its destination anyway. It was bombed by allied planes.
Ruth (1916-1993) was a cousin of Anne, and she, her sister Sophie and brother survived the Nazi genocide, inside Germany, in Frankfurt. She told me how her elderly aunt was taken in a wheelchair to a death camp. And how on Crystal Night, when Jewish businesses and homes were vandalized, her brother stood downstairs in their house with a shotgun and shouted that their father, who was a Jew, was dead.
Which summarizes for me the greatest tragedy of the Jewish genocide, and the African genocide: evil can only win when we do not see ourselves as one. If Germans had responded to the Nazis the way the Danes did: that a citizen is a citizen is a citizen, 6 million Jews would not have been murdered, or a million Romany, or goodness knows how many physically or mentally disabled.
