After Uvalde, what will ‘truly good of heart’ do?

On June 12, 1942, a red-andwhite checkered diary became one of the most famous birthday gifts in history.

The recipient was a Jewish girl from Germany living in Amsterdam with her family.

She wanted to be a writer, and for about two years she filled her diary with her thoughts, observations and dreams, not knowing she was writing her masterwork, the only book she’d have the time to write.

Less than a month after receiving the diary, Anne Frank, her parents and older sister, and four other Jews went into hiding in a secret annex at the back of her father’s company building. They’d remain there until Aug. 4, 1944, when Nazi police, tipped off, found and arrested them. The only survivors from that annex and the concentration camps to which they were sent were Anne’s father, Otto, and her diary.

“The Diary of Anne Frank” is the most-celebrated book written by a child — because it was written by a child, with a precocious talent, hiding for her life.

On June 20, 1944, she wrote: “Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing, and I have an even greater need to get all kinds of things off my chest.”

Decades later, we still care about the musings of this 13year-old girl. The most famous is from July 15, 1944, the thirdto-last passage. “It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality,” she wrote. “It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”

Those last words — “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” — have been used for decades as a feel-good affirmation, often accompanied by a picture of a smiling Anne holding a pencil.

But it was a belief grounded in hope, and we should never forget that the most important pages of “The Diary of Anne Frank” are the pages never written. Her last entry was Aug. 1, 1944. She was arrested three days later.

What would she have written about the horrors she suffered and witnessed in the BergenBelsen concentration camp, before dying from typhus fever, in February 1945, at 15.

One sentence after Anne states her belief in people’s goodness: “I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions.”

I cannot read that without thinking of the children of Uvalde because, like most of you, I can’t read or hear anything these days without thinking of the children of Uvalde.

The children in Robb Elementary who heard the approaching thunder of an AR-15style rifle, and who hid in classrooms and under desks for what may have seemed to them two years; the children who were destroyed; the children who, according to pediatrician Dr. Roy Guerrero, were “pulverized” and “decapitated” by gunfire.

And I can’t understand the people, no doubt good of heart, who aren’t moved enough to make such a weapon less accessible. I always return to what the legendary columnist Murray Kempton wrote of Martin Luther King Jr.: “A great man knows he wasn’t put on this earth to be part of a process through which a child can be hurt.”

That should guide personal behavior and public policy.

Like Anne Frank, I believe (most) people are truly good at heart. But there weren’t any great people to save her life. Today, there aren’t enough great people among elected officials trying to save the lives of other children.