"Anne’s story consumes a small percentage of the pages here; it’s sandwiched between two long passages about the author’s French Catholic mother and Dutch Jewish father. The van Maarsens escaped deportation and murder only because of the mother’s Aryan status: She pulled strings to cancel the children’s registration as Jews, and her husband was permitted to remove his yellow star upon providing a (false) affidavit that he’d been sterilized. None of them knew the fate of the Franks until Otto returned after the war; it was not long thereafter that he and the author learned of his two daughters’ deaths at Bergen-Belsen.
Anne Frank enthusiasts will wish for more about her, but van Maarsen offers valuable testimony about the particular tensions and horrors her own family endured."
~ Robert Greene
"MY NAME IS ANNE, SHE SAID"
I haven't read that one yet. But I read some of Inheriting Anne Frank by Jacqueline van Maarsen, and it's clear that she and the other surviving childhood friends didn't always see eye to eye, in regards to their friend's legacy, by any stretch of the imagination.
While looking up Otto Frank yesterday, I was perhaps naively surprised to know that this Rabbi believes:
'To condemn Otto Frank is painful but necessary."
~ Eli Kavon
"Otto Frank and Anne’s Jewish legacy - opinion"
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-747143
He just decided that's how it is. Really. Well, when has that happened before!
I just felt it was a real pity that he decided to have such a narrow-minded reaction to what one person (in this case, Anne Frank's father) had gone through.
No comments:
Post a Comment