Happy 77th, Anne Frank

Yup, what would have been Anne Frank's 77th birthday was yesterday. To commemorate perhaps the most famous diarist ever, the Greensboro Public Library had a reading of the book culled from her diary - beginning to end, all day in the lobby of the Central Library. Come to think of it, I could have given you a heads-up before yesterday. My bad.

I've always felt a special connectedness with Anne Frank, in part because my Jewish elementary school education emphasized the connectedness of all Jews, and in part because her family was discovered in their attic hiding place on the very day my mother was born.

So, feeling a sisterly affection for Anne, and being a compulsive voluneerer, I offered to read during one of the 15-minute shifts. I got there just in time to hear a little blond girl scout finish her shift. The girl scout was likely the age Anne was when she wrote those passages, and though the scout giggled a little when reading of Anne's newly blooming affection for attic-mate Peter, I could imagine her writing similar stuff in her own diary, tucked between the mattresses in a bedroom she can leave freely.

Back in April, I went with Rob on a business trip to Richmond. While he worked, I puttered around the city, going to museums and generally wasting gas. One of the museums I visited was the Virginia Holocaust Museum (not to be confused with the Holocaust museum in Washington - somehow I can never convince myself to drive to Washington just to feel terrible for an afternoon).

A Holocaust museum can't help but be a moving place but what was so interesting about the one in Richmond is that for lack of better displays, such as piles of victim-related goods like glasses and shoes, this museum elicited the appropriate emotions in baser (is that a word?) ways. The lights in many of the display rooms wouldn't turn on until you walked in the room; consequently, the lights pop on and you're standing face-to-face with a mannequin dressed as an SS guard or rows of emaciated prisoner mannequins. In another part of the exhibit, you crawl through a poorly lit tunnel and turn a corner to a display of a family of mannequins, reenacting the potato cellar hide out of the founder of the museum, complete with pet rat. Appealing to my emotions that way made me feel a little... I don't know... cheated is the wrong word but the closest I can come to how I felt... like stepping on my foot was okay so long as I cried.

Ultimately, though, I appreciated what they were doing and that the founder would spend his life reliving his Holocaust experience so that others would learn. With atrocity that great, there's no way to truly express it, to communicate the horror, but it's worth trying in the hopes that remembering will prevent history from repeating.

Much like the reading of the Diary of Anne Frank at the library. Yes, the diary was abridged to present Anne as more angelic, a more sympathetic victim. But that doesn't make her story any less worthy of remembering.