Anne Frank...

“People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but that doesn't stop you from having your own opinion.”

I'm unable to not comment any longer. It makes me feel bad, like some sort of collaborator or one of those informers that sent Jewish people to the concentration camps in the war. But comment I must ,despite what anyone might think.

I read Anne Frank’s diary at school; well, everybody did. It was expected as part of some sort of post-holocaust rite of passage, even though the war had been over for twenty years. It made me very sad. Years later I made the pilgrimage to Amsterdam and her house to soak up her pain. That made me even sadder. 

Since then I’ve watched the films about boys in striped pyjamas and fiddlers on the roof, read the books - ‘is it safe?’, and listened to the survivors of the holocaust recounting their tales. I’ve even seen my Uncle Len’s photographs of Belsen – real pictures taken by him – snapped as he helped liberate that terrible place from the Nazis.

Awful. Dirty. Despicable. Too much to bear. It left the whole world guilt-ridden and attempting to make amends.

And then this. 

How did the people that suffered so much become the people inflicting suffering? Taking away another people’s pride, killing innocent children, stealing their land, sneering as they do it. 

It sounds too familiar. How is it justifiable?

No matter what the past, how can this be justified?

Two wrongs can never make a right. War is still war, murder still murder, and greed still greed.

I wonder what Anne Frank would make of it? I think that she would have lowered her pretty, dead, head and wept.