Anne Frank Remembered Clip

Anne Frank Remembered Clip

Shared via AddThis

 

Thank you to  Arutz Sheva for the clip   

 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132923. 

As a teenager I attended Oriel girls school in Rhodesia.  I remember going to a school play one evening.  It was the story of Anne Frank.  I was both impressed, intrigued and saddened at the story that was enacted before my eyes. 

 

 

As a child of the sixty’s, born just 15 years after the end of the Second World War I was remarkably ignorant about the war that devistated so much of the world and the holocaust that took so many lives.  I learned nothing about it in school and this play, along with various hellfire and glory movies were the only things to informing me about this tragic part of  history.  I think perhaps the world was trying to heal itself by forgetting what had happened.  It certainly wasn’t being openly discussed or was it that the adults were trying to keep the shocking, bitter truth from their children and preserve the innocence of childhood?  I saw war movies for what they were, making something very nasty into something exciting and even glorious.  I was not a man or a soldier but  a little girl just like Anne Frank. 

I think her story touched me because I came to know about her when I was the same age as she would have been.  Like her, as well, I kept a diary from the age of eleven onwards and like her I shared my thoughts, feelings, dreams and hopes for the future with the little book.  Although from a different time and place we would have shared many similarities as all young girls do.  The play being done by and presented in a school was the story of a child, a young girl and a human being and yet I do think of her as a hero, my hero.  She didn’t fight in any wars or save the world but fought a kind of a battle for her own survival.  Sadly she lost and what she experienced in those last days or weeks of her life in the concentration camp was also lost with her death.  But, we still have her to remember through her writing, a very personal, innocent and honest account of her trials and tribulations.  I believe I not only saw the play but read a book about her as well as seeing a film made many years ago. Now she is remembered through the film and book based on her diary; a German postage stamp commemorates her would be 80th birthday; a pink rose Soverneir  d Anne Frank is named after her and in her home town a small statue remembers her.    She has become somewhat of an icon amongst the many who died in the Holocaust.  But, no drama or account can ever bring close the atrocity of what we today remember distantly as the holocaust. The numers and events too catastrophic to envisage but made a little comprehensible by the account of one sadly missed young girl.

The facts of the holocaust of which she was a victim are accounted in Wikipaedea as follows

The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστον (holókauston): holos, “whole” and kaustos, “burnt”), also known as The Shoah (Hebrew: השואה, Latinized ha’shoah; Yiddish: חורבן, Latinized churben or hurban^[2]) is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a program of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, its allies, and collaborators.^[3] Some scholars maintain that the definition of the Holocaust should also include the Nazis’ systematic murder of millions of people in other groups, including ethnic Poles, the Romani, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other political and religious opponents.^[4] By this definition, the total number of Holocaust victims is between 11 million and 17 million people.^[5]

 

The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labor until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Romani were crammed into ghettos before being transported by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Nazi Germany‘s bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called “a genocidal state”.^[6]

 ^{From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust}

^{May we never forget}

 

Sacred Memories – The meaning of empty shoes.

      

 Empty Shoes

One of the most poignant monuments in the Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum is the mountainous display of empty shoes. Thousands and thousands  of ownerless shoes; old people’s shoes, young people’s shoes, sturdy shoes, torn shoes, large shoes, little shoes and even infant shoes. All are empty; their bearers never to walk again.

This jarring image brings the Holocaust home with a vengeance. It does not just tug at the heart, it figuratively tears it apart. Each one of these  shoes was worn by a vibrant, breathing, creative human being. The souls that inhabited the shoes were cruelly driven from the Earth before their time; the shoe, forlorn and alone, is left to bear witness. The image is jarring precisely because the shoes remind us that we too bear witness. We are living testimony to a vibrancy that would have been. The emptiness of these shoes invokes our sacred responsibility to fill a yawning gap that never should have been.

The shoes are jarring for yet another reason; they proclaim the sanctity of this place. Where six million die there is horror. Where innocent souls  are shattered there is tragedy. Where human beings are transformed into gruesome piles of bones and charred flesh there are no answers. There is no room for musing, no room for understanding; travesty numbs the mind.

 There can be no thought; there can be only reverence. Six million souls demand stillness and respect; acknowledgement of  G-d’s infinite vastness.  

 The room is sacred; the memories are holy. As G-d said to Moses, “Remove your shoes, you tread on hallowed ground.”

It might have been a fitting tribute for all visitors to remove their own shoes and leave them beside this display. We are not more worthy than they; our shoes no more deserving than theirs. Yet we don’t do that, and for good reason. Our creed does not celebrate death; we mourn it. Our response is not to join the ranks of despair, but to commit to ever more vibrant life. We are determined to move forward; we are determined to fill our shoes and in the process to fill theirs too. Their memory is hallowed, their death tragic, but we aim to sanctify it, by allowing it to energize us in life.

 Priestly Shoes

      When Jewish priests ascend the synagogue’s podium to bless the congregation they too remove their shoes. The blessing of the Jewish people is a sacred affair and the priests dare not tread on this hallowed ground with shoes. Yet, the image of their shoes lined up against the wall evokes a completely different response. What is the difference between the empty shoes of blessing and the empty shoes of death? Don’t they both denote holiness?

Rabbi Pesach Crone offers the following response.(1) The shoes of the priests will soon be worn again; they will carry their bearers to yet another mitzvah (good deed). One will carry its owner to Bible studies, the other to visit the ill, yet another to offer charity and another to pray to G-d. These shoes are temporarily bare while their owners bless the children of Israel; the other shoes will remain empty forever.  Never will they carry their owners to the performance of a good deed; never will they enable their owners to worship G-d. A life story has ended abruptly; a symphony of good deeds was silenced before it reached its crescendo.  Those lives will never be reclaimed, but the music of their worship need not stop. It is up to us to continue their song, to pick up where they left off. This is perhaps the most poignant message of the empty shoes.

 

 Six million lives forever gone, twelve million shoes forever empty, but the music of these souls need not end. We can perpetuate their memories through our prayers and good deeds. We might perform a mitzvah in their memory or pray on their behalf. We might give to charity in their honor or dedicate our spiritual growth to their inspiration. In this way, their shoes  will take up the walk; their rhythmic sound of falling footsteps will echo once  again. The flow of their good deeds will spring back to life.

     

Kaddish

This, suggests why the preeminent Jewish memorial prayer, the Kaddish, contains no mention of the deceased’s name. The Kaddish is  not only about remembering, it is also about restoring. Every life is a tribute to the creative power of G-d. As we recognize our debt of gratitude to the Almighty we sanctify His Divine name. Our passing leaves an undesired and unintended, but very real, hole in the sanctification of the Divine. It is left to the living to fill this gap.

 

When our loved ones recite Kaddish in our memory, our soul’s sanctification of G-d continues. The Kaddish does not contain the name of  the deceased because it is not about the deceased; it is about G-d who was sanctified through the life of the deceased and after life through Kaddish. Furthermore, through the Kaddish the deceased continues to live, albeit on a higher and holier plane. 

 

It is our destiny to walk in their footsteps. It is our responsibility to resume the song that was prematurely muted. It is our sacred duty to honor the empty shoes by restoring the vibrancy of their owners’ souls.

Yitagadal veyitkadash shmei rabbah….

 

 Footnotes

1) His moving essay, “Soulless Shoes,” can be found in a book called In The Spirit of the Maggid.

 

Rabbi Eliezer (Lazer) Gurkow, currently serving as rabbi of

congregation Beth Tefilah in London, Ontario, is a well-known

speaker and writer on Torah issues and current affairs.

Remembering the Children on Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 21

(IsraelNN.com) The Central Theme of Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day on April 21, 2009 is “Children in the Holocaust.” One and a half million Jewish children were murdered in the holocaust and were thus prevented from growing up and fulfilling their basic rights: to live, dream, love, play and laugh. Some faded photographs of children under the Nazi regime remain, and their questioning, accusing eyes cry out.

From the day the Nazis came to power, Jewish children became acquainted with cruelty, first in Germany and, as time passed, in every other country the Germans conquered or forged an alliance. The parents and families of these children were unable to grant them the security and protection they needed. Jewish children were separated from their non-Jewish playmates and expelled from state-sponsored schools. They saw their parents lose the right to support their families, and often witnessed the descent of the family unit into an abyss of despair.

As war broke out and anti-Semitic policies worsened, the suffering of Jewish children increased: many were doomed to the horrific suffering of life in the ghetto – the bitter cold, the never-ending hunger and a multitude of dangerous diseases. There, cut off from the world, they lived in the shadow of endless terror and violence. As smuggling was central to survival in the ghettos, they were often forced to assume the new role of breadwinner for their disintegrating families. Henrika Lazobert, a Jewish poet, wrote a paean to a daring young smuggler who, despite the risks, persevered in finding food for his family. The poem ends:

I shall no longer come back to you [mother]
… and only on my lips
will one worry freeze fast:
My beloved mother, tomorrow who’ll bring you
your piece of bread as in the past?

Still, children in the Holocaust remained children, desiring only to partake in activities beloved by all their contemporaries. In August 1940 David Rabinowitz, a young boy from a village near Kielce, Poland, wrote in his diary: “During the war, I’ve been studying by myself, at home. When I remember that I used to go to school, I feel like crying.”

When the deportations to the extermination camps began, a chasm opened up in the lives of Jewish children. Throughout Nazi Europe, they fled and hid, separated from their parents and loved ones. Some of them found refuge in the homes of decent people whose conscience would not allow them to remain passive; several were hidden in convents and monasteries and boarding schools; others were forced to roam through forests and villages, hunting for food like wild animals and relying entirely on their own ingenuity and resourcefulness. Many were forced to live under assumed identities, longingly anticipating the return of their father and mother. Some were so young when separated from their parents that they forgot their real names and Jewish identity. Many were forced to train themselves not to move, laugh or cry, or even talk. Upon liberation, one little girl asked her mother, “Mommy, may I cry now?”

Of course, not all Jewish children were lucky enough to find a place of refuge, and many tens of thousands of children were caught and sent to the death camps. Their young age made most the first prey of the Nazi killing machine.

Yet wherever they were – in the ghettos, in hiding and even in the camps – they did not surrender moments of childish playfulness. A short break in a daily routine of hunger and dread was enough to summon gales of joyous laughter, childish brawls, and games with toys made of rags and scraps of paper. Together with their beloved dolls, the children could dream of a better world, of returning to their family and lost childhood; and only to these dolls could they open their aching hearts.

At the end of the war, a new chapter began, one of both hope and pain for the life that was gone, never to return. Many children were lost to their families and their Jewish heritage forever. For others, the war’s end marked a beginning of their return to their real selves, a process filled with difficulties and torment. Very slowly, they emerged from hiding, from the forests and the camps, and began the long and painful process of rehabilitation. Despite the scars, they sought to rebuild their lives anew.

This article originally appeared in the April 2009 edition of Yad Vashem Jeusalem Magazine

A True Hero 21 April 2009

New York City, N.Y., Apr 18, 2009 / 12:58 pm (CNA).- On Sunday evening CBS broadcast a movie about the heroic efforts and “courageous heart” of Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker who created and led an underground group that rescued Jewish children from Nazi persecution.

Sendler created and led a conspiracy of women who moved in and out of Warsaw’s Jewish Ghetto disguised as nurses. While saying that they were simply to prevent and contain the spread of Typhus and Spotted Fever, Sendler and her companions helped the children of consenting Jewish parents escape imminent deportation to death camps, CBS’ website says.

The children were sometimes sedated and hidden inside boxes, suitcases and coffins to escape the ghetto. They were given new identities and placed with Polish families and in convents.

Sendler kept a hidden record of the children’s birth names and locations in hopes that they could be reunited with their families. About 2,500 children were smuggled to safety, with none being discovered by the Nazis.

After the Nazis discovered her operation in 1943, Sendler was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, who broke her feet. On the day of her execution, she was rescued by the underground network “Zegota,” with which she had worked to save Jewish children.

She kept a Divine Mercy holy card from her prison cell until 1979, when she gave the card to Pope John Paul II as a gift.

CBS broadcast “The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler,” a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, on Sunday, April 19 at 9 p.m. Eastern Time. It starred Anna Paquin as Irena while her mother was played by Academy Award winner Marcia Gay Harden.

Nathaniel Parker played the role of Dr. Majkowski, the head of Warsaw’s Department of Health who helped Sendler’s operation

Copied from http://douglawrence.wordpress.com/2009/04/18/cbs