Anne Frank

Anne Frank.

News of the death of Miep Gies yesterday renewed once again, the story of Otto Frank and his family. And every single time that I read about their struggles to survive the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands, it is like a kick to the stomach.

Oh, I know that inside the pages of Anne Frank's diary, there are many examples of real courage, real heroism and selfless sacrifice but personally, I am never able to get over the circumstances under which this story was born.

A few years ago, I traveled to Germany and on a cold, snowy day in March, I visited the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. The first thing that struck me was the sheer size. Spread out over nearly five acres, the place is immense. It is filled with 2711 concrete slabs (steles) of various sizes which are arranged in neat rows. The effect is disjointed and disturbing. Like most, I put pencil to paper and learned that each stele could represent four to six THOUSAND people who were exterminated either through starvation or execution. Jews alone, could account for over 2100 people per slab. As I wandered around through the endless sea of steles, the magnitude of those numbers made my head hurt.

(photo courtesy of Wikimedia)

It was more than the death, though. It was the manner in which these people were treated before they died. Ghettos. Cattle cars. Concentration camps. It scars the soul. And the fact is, the Holocaust did not happen in a vacuum. The Nazis were not the only ones responsible. People knew what was going on. Ordinary citizens of multiple nationalities and ethnicities hid their fellow man trying to help him escape the horror.

People knew.

And still, at the end of it all, at least eleven million (some estimates put it as high as seventeen million) "undesirables" were murdered. How does that happen?

I guess we only need to look at Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur for the answer.