The Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial is set near the middle of Boise, just off Capital Boulevard not far south of the Statehouse, and on the banks of the Boise River. Founded in 2002, it is the only Anne Frank memorial in the United States.
Boise might seem an odd place for it, or would if you think of it rigidly as a memorial to human rights generically, or to specific events in Nazi Europe generations ago.
It should do more.
Anne Frank is known primarily through the moving diary she left behind, and if you didn’t read it in school (as I and many people have), here’s a summary. Of Jewish heritage, she was born in Germany four years before Adolf Hitler came to power. Reading the portents, the family moved to the Netherlands, which worked until that country was overrun by the Nazis in 1940. Jews there as elsewhere in Nazis territory were persecuted, grabbed by Nazi forces, and taken away, sometimes deported or sent to concentration camps. The air was drenched in a deeply justified fear.
Keeping a low profile became not enough, and the Frank family went into hiding, in a small dark space inside a building, helped by friends who kept them out of sight and supplied with food and other necessities. Anne Frank’s dairy centered on what that nightmare looked and felt like.
The Gestapo found them in June 1944. Anne Frank, with her sister, was sent to the Auschwitz and then Bergan-Belsen concentration camps; she died at the latter, age 15. She was one of millions of people who perished in the Holocaust.
How much of it relates to what’s happening now has become a matter of controversy.
There is unquestionable similarity at least in part. Here and now in the United States people are seized or forced into hiding not because of what they did but because of their ethnicity – or opposition to the powers that be in Washington. Networks of citizens are loosely organized to try to help them, people who signal when the officials are coming or provide food and medical assistance for those who dare not show themselves in daylight – who feel unsafe going to school or a store or even to seek medical help. We do have people shot to death in the streets.
We do have, in many communities these days, a growing atmosphere of terror, unlike anything America has experienced but something Anne Frank might have recognized from the Netherlands circa 1942.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz made the comparison explicit at a January 25 news conference: “We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
Or maybe – remembering the mass roundup late last year – in Wilder. Idaho is not exempt.
There are of course plenty of people who look at this differently, starting with the Trump Administration. There are nuanced reactions too. Deborah Lauter, executive director of New York’s Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights, who said “If people are upset about what’s happening in democracy, they can talk about authoritarianism and fascism, but making direct comparisons to the Holocaust crosses the line and we see it as Holocaust distortion, which, as I said, is seen as a threat to the legacy of the Holocaust. We don’t want to compare.”
She may not want to compare, but we must. What after all is the point of paying careful attention to Anne Frank’s and those of the millions of other victims of the Holocaust if we do not? If there is a point, it is in the admonition made by many Jewish people after World War II: Never Again.
No, this is not the Holocaust: It is not exactly the same, nor is it all that it was. But it sure echoes. What we have now should not have to check every box before we take action to keep it from getting there.
Visit the Anne Frank memorial, and think about what we – and you – should do next.
(image)
Share on Facebook
