It could be worse

We’re all cooped up in our dwellings. The stress is showing. Pottstown has seen two domestic homicides in the last two weeks and a fatal shootout with police. To match the shocking suddenness and privations of the pandemic, you’d have to go back to World War II. Today we can still get out into the fresh air (keeping our distance) and buy food and other essentials. The same was not true for the Jews after Hitler came to power in Germany. One of the most powerful teaching tools about hate and oppression is “The Diary of Anne Frank.” While visiting Pottstown Middle School some years ago, I recall an English teacher telling me the profound impact the diary had on her eighth graders. (It’s a major theme in the movie “Freedom Writers,” now streaming on Netflix.) When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, they first identified and isolated the Jews. By 1942 they began deporting them to concentration camps. Eventually, three-quarters of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands were murdered. About 30,000 went into hiding. By 1944, the attics, cellars and secret rooms of Amsterdam hid tens of thousands of Jews. Anne Frank was 13 years old when she went into hiding in 1942 with her parents, sister, and three others. They lived on two floors of her father’s warehouse in the center of Amsterdam. Anne wrote about her life in a diary, which survived the war. Five gentile warehouse employees of her father’s helped keep them hidden and brought them food. All Jews in hiding were completely dependent on others, often people they didn’t know very well. Anyone found harboring Jews was likely to be sent to a labor camp or even shot. Rationing made it difficult

AN ELDERLY JEWISH COUPLE pass away the hours in an attic hideout of a gentile homeowner in Amsterdam in 1943. Only the courage of their host stood between them and the Gestapo.