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“Dear Anne…” My letter to Anne Frank for Holocaust Memorial Day
For Holocaust Memorial Day 27 January 2016
“In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.” – Anne Frank
What would you make of it all?
Would you be surprised at what has happened to the Jewish people since your death and how the Jewish story is unfolding in the 21st century? Would you be shocked at how we have misused the memory of the Holocaust? Would you be dismayed at the mess we have made of your legacy?
What words would you be writing in your diary today? What would you hope for and dream of?
It was supposed to be the genocide to end all genocides. The final warning of the monumental power of hatred. But then there was Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur.
And all that we have learnt is that we will never learn.
Each generation must discover that there is no victory over hatred, only reprieves and endless vigilance.
Many have asked what should it mean to be a Jew after Auschwitz, after Belsen, after Treblinka? What should it mean to be a Jew after Anne Frank?
Anne, you have become the representative of the one and a half million Jewish children murdered by Hitler and the Nazis during their war against the Jewish people. We cannot comprehend all of those lost lives but we can treasure yours. As you said once in your diary: “I wish to go on living after my death.” That’s what I would like for you too. Your faith in humanity and your belief that goodness can triumph in the harshest of times, is a message we must hold onto tightly.
But what happens when your death, and all of those you have come to represent, becomes abused by your own people and used to justify the blotting out of another people, their identity, their history and their heritage?
What have we done to your memory, Anne, when we choose to label every critic of Israel as anti-Semitic and every Palestinian a modern-day Nazi? What happens to the meaning of your life when we choose to see ourselves as endless victims, endlessly threatened?
The truth is that after more than 70 years the Jewish people are still suffering from a terrible trauma. It is a trauma that has skewed our collective thinking and our sense of identity. A trauma that has sent our moral compass into spasm.
In Israel, and throughout Diaspora Jewry, the Holocaust has been used to explain and justify every aggression, every Palestinian family dispossessed, every piece of land stolen, every house bulldozed, as necessary acts of security to prevent a second Holocaust.
As the Israeli commentator Boaz Evron wrote in 1980:
“Two terrible things happened to the Jewish people in this century: the Holocaust and the lessons learned from it.”
Zionism took the Holocaust as the ultimate vindication of its theory of Jewish history. Jews had no future in Europe, they were outsiders who would never be totally accepted and only a Jewish state of our own could bring us normalcy and safety. But in the 21st century what looks more abnormal and anachronistic than an ‘ethno-cratic’ Jewish state that by its very nature must favour one group of citizens over another.
With tragic irony, we have created for ourselves an ever more strident nationalism based on beliefs of ethnic, religious and cultural superiority. We have recreated in our ancestral homeland the very factors that caused our persecution in Europe and yet we describe it as a miraculous rebirth.
Today there are Jewish voices of compassion and contrition. But the voices of arrogance and chauvinism that prefer might to right and Jewish power over Jewish ethics are heard more loudly.
Anne, today we need your simple good faith in human nature like never before. We need you to live on after your death.
Do you remember writing these beautiful words?
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
Anne, may your bright spirit be remembered. May your hopes live on through others. May your learning be our learning.
Yours in search of justice, kindness and humility.
Robert Cohen
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