Today I decided to check out some stories I'd heard in the last few weeks to find out if they were accurate or "fake news". I was especially interested to learn if Anne Frank's family had applied for entry into the USA. I have thought of her a lot lately. Since the "Watch Party" on election night, she has been constantly with me. As a child, her diary became more than just another book on the bookshelf. I was too young to remember the War but my father, uncles, and friends’ parents had fought in WWII. The Diary of Anne Frank was the book which explained to me in school girl terms which were understandable to me what the War was about. She was my age. She had dreams similar to mine. I had difficulty being confined to my room, with big windows and lots of toys, for an hour. I could not imagine what it would be like to be forced to be quiet for hours, instead of for just a few minutes. Death had touched my life. I was sleeping with my Grandmother when I was ten when she died from a heart attack. A couple of years later my dad was killed in an auto accident. I related to the extreme pain yet knew that these were "natural" occurrence, not politically induced murder on the massive scale which forced the Frank family into hiding.
The Election of 2016 to me is a watershed year. Until now I have tolerated friends who differed with me politically and voted to install dishonest politicians into office. This year is different. This year a vote for Donald Trump to me is a vote to bring the realities experienced by Anne Frank and her family to families here in the USA.
I was always intrigued by the stories in history books. Books were my friend and I consumed them. History was never boring to me. Beyond the confines of a diary by a young girl my age, I read more about how Hitler came into power and what is different and similar between pre Nazi Germany and the USA. I got into family history and discovered that "Patrick Henry's crazy first wife" was a cousin of one of my great great, great grandmothers who was also related to George Washington's mother. I saw land deeds showing family farms on the road near the sites where important battles in the Revolutionary War occurred and traced immigrants who came as indentured servant and immigrants who came as investors in the Virginia Company.
Our family was enriched by friendships with immigrants who left mainland China when Communism took over, by people who we sponsored when they fled Viet Nam, by college friends of mine and my sister's from the Middle East, Ethiopia and through academic exchanges with Communist bloc nations during the Cold War. One sister is a Middle Eastern Area Specialist and I am trained as an Eastern European Area Specialist. Our mother, after she was widowed, went back to college and worked for the US Justice Department. Part of the mosaic of my life includes memories when as a little girl. I was led by my teachers with my classmates into the hallway of our elementary school when the alarms went off. I was part of the generation of children who were instructed to hide our heads and crouch down against the wall on the first floor or basement when the alarms when off during the bomb drills during the Cold War. My lifetime spanned beyond the days when there were Air Alerts to prepare us for "Civil Defense" should the Russians attack the Strategic Air Command Base 40 miles away or the ordinance plant a few miles outside of our small East Texas Town. I remember sitting in my mother's hospital room during her final journey out of this world through cancer watching the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of Nicholai Ceasceacu in Romania.A few months later I was on the Plaza in Prague in person I listening to speeches during their first elections after the fall of Communism and was in Romania during their first "free" elections.
I am not young anymore. I have been surrounded by people who fled Middle Eastern and Soviet Bloc countries because their lives were in danger, by people who lost dear ones violently. I have learned from them and I have learned from scholars and I have learned from observing. This year I am more frightened for my own country than I have ever been in my life. I fear that the similarities between where we are now and what preceded the election of Adolph Hitler in Germany are too many and much more common than I find comfortable. I see attitudes which allowed despots to become entrenched in Eastern Europe more rampant here than is healthy. I know that other countries with many fine decent moral people went down pathways which endangered the people and what they held dear. I know how much easier it is for a despot to consolidate power once in office than it is for someone to acquire that office legitimately the first time.
I know two women who have lived through incredible changes in their native countries and immigrated to the USA. One grew up in Berlin and shared how the signs before Hitler took power were gradual but apparent. She said that they heard stories but didn't believe them because it seemed unbelievable that such things could happen where they lived to people they knew. By the time they accepted it as true, it was too late. The other woman was one of my Russian Professor's mentors. When she would visit our university, I would make sure that there was a good selection of Chi in her room and listen to anything she would share with me about her life.
Her father was a member of the last Russian Duma. As a child she lived in a palace in St. Petersburg. She lived through the Revolution, and only some of her family survived the "Great Patriotic War." Her series of books about that time describes graphically how they survived by boiling rats and how the men died faster than the women during the famine. She escaped and eventually ended up in France. When it was time to "be repatriated" to the USSR a high ranking officer warned her that those who were being returned were not really going home. She came to the west instead. She learned later that those who "returned" were exterminated by Stalin.
This year many people think the Presidential Election is just American politics as usual. I don't. I am afraid. The shadow of Anne Frank falls over my consciousness.
I have a friend who has been one of my closest confidants for over 30 years. We met while I was in grad school and she was an undergraduate headed to law school. She's been a prosecutor in an adjacent county for decades and much of her work has centered on sexual assault, domestic violence and crimes against and by minors. We have always been very honest with each other. She is someone I trusted to tell me the truth about myself, even when no one else would. We have always had each other's backs. Frequently we have voted for different candidates but that has been OK. This year, for me, it is no longer OK. As a person who was stalked and sexually assaulted, knowing my friend, an officer of the court, could weigh the negatives of Hillary Clinton heavier than the realities of turning over the Department of Justice, appointment of the AG, to a man who has the sexual history of Donald Trump was a betrayal greater than I have been able to process and continue casually relating to my "closest girlfriend.."
I see her as an "Officer of the Court" who opened my life personally and the lives of other victims whose stories she knows to oversight by a man who is a molester! I told my friend that "i no longer see her as a safe person." This is truly sad to me and to her, but right now it is part of my reality. The shadow of Anne Frank also hangs over us. It is more than just his attitude which comes from his own mouth, from tapes of his interviews with Sterne or on video tape, from testimonies of beauty pageant contestants who were molested by him, by the civil case for rape of a 13 year old where there are 3 other witnesses.
I wonder how "people of faith" can ignore these things and file into the pews on Sunday morning and open their hymnals and be so confident that their vote for Donald Trump was a "holy act of obedience." I choose not to sit there with them. I wonder if their vote is an act which brings the realities faced by Anne Frank to children here in America.
Some of them have explained it to me in their own way. Some mention their objection to abortion. I do not accept that as a valid reason for ignoring the other evidence, especially because no one can demonstrate that legalizing or outlawing abortion changes the number of abortions. They occurred before Roe vs Wade. After Roe vs. Wade it merely changed where they occurred, whether those performing them were licensed or not, and the percentage of women's lives as well as that of the unborn will be lost.
I understand the deep respect for human life with prompts some to select political leaders solely on pro-life or pro-choice positions, but reject the sanity in such practices. In reality, most politicians who claim to be "pro-life" cut food stamp funding, oppose health care for those who need it and fight against most things which truly extend or enhance life. To me life is much more than just the few months before birth. It encompasses everything from conception through cremation or the coffin.
Like many other politicians, Donald Trump has duped and used those who sincerely oppose abortion. For him, most of his positions are merely expediency. One of my best friends is an RN who was an EMT in Atlantic City, NJ. Her father had an import/export business in the building where the Planned Parenthood Clinic was located. That was a clinic which performed abortions and Donald Trump was one of the largest donors to that clinic at that time. I doubt that he has truly changed his mind on the morality of abortion. Instead, he adopted a position which would get him a block of supporters to help him win the Primary. For Donald, it is expediency. I think those who voted for him because they thought he was pro-life got duped.
I am told by many that we should give him a chance. I wonder, should we give him a chance? If so, how much and for how long? Do we wait until he is "in power" to express dissent or do we remain silent and wait hoping the signs we are seeing will not produce what we fear?
I had another experience which flashes through my mind a lot lately. While in Grad School I got a travel grant which allowed me to spend some time in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. This was during the final hours of the Goborchev administration. We spent a very pleasant afternoon in an old Hapsburg fort on the Danube in Nova Sad Yugoslavia. It was sunny and we sipped cherry brandy while the guide explained that the fort had never been used in a battle. It was now an artist colony. However, he told us about a very dark day during WWII when one Sunday morning soldiers knocked on the doors of many Jews, gypsies and others. They marched them to the frozen river and forced them at gun point to cut holes in the ice. The townspeople watched as over 1/3 of the population was forced under the ice and drowned that Sunday morning.
I wonder if there was a point earlier than that Sunday morning when people urged some of the people who died that morning, and many others who watched in horror, that they should be patient and give the new political leaders a chance?
Maybe Donald Trump is not a Nazi. He has aligned himself with so many who are and said so much which resonates that way that it will take more than just rhetoric for him to PROVE it to many people around the world. I'd rather him have to PROVE that he isn't than for his acts to demonstrate that he is.
In my journey to discover if the Frank family truly sought political asylum in the United States, I discovered that the NY Times, Time Magazine and Reuters covered the story when documents were uncovered in 2007. Her father, Otto Frank appealed to his college friend Nathan Straus, Jr. for a $5000 bond and affadivits to help get his family into the United States. Straus was the head of the federal Housing Authority, a personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt's and his father was a co-owner of Macy's Department Store.
In their 2007 story when the documents were uncovered the New York Times story said: “Page by page, the papers illustrate the tortuous process for gaining entry to the United States in those days. Even with powerful connections and money, European Jews could not overcome the State Department's restrictions against refugees, said two Holocaust scholars who examined the documents.”
The New York Times Reported: By June 1941, no one with close relatives still in Germany was allowed into the United States because of suspicions that the Nazis could use them to blackmail refugees into clandestine cooperation. That development ended the possibility of getting the Frank girls out through a children's rescue agency.
Because of the uncertainty, Otto Frank decided to try for a single visa for himself. It was granted and forwarded to him on Dec. 1. No one knows if it arrived. Ten days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States and Havana canceled the visa.
In a 2007 Time Magazine article it was reported that: Straus and Frank's brother-in-law, Julius Hollander, regularly corresponded with two private Jewish agencies, the National Refugee Service in New York and the Boston Committee for Refugees. Straus also contacted the State Department on Frank's behalf. Hollander and his brother arranged affidavits from their employers, Jacob Hiatt of E.F. Dodge Paper Box Co. and Harry Levine of the New England Novelty Co., both of Leominster, Mass.
On 4 September 2015, Anne Frank's step-sister, Eva Schloss,, drew direct parallels between the Syrian refugee crisis and the Jewish refugee crisis of World War II:
"You must not be selfish and you must share whatever you have and help in a desperate situation. They need help from you.
"These people have had the courage to do a very difficult thing- to take your family and your whole life to another country requires bravery and strength. This is history repeating itself.
"These Syrians are valuable, educated people. These are doctors and nurses who are only too willing to help our society and they will become leaders in the community if you let them."
Anne’s mother, Edith, wrote to a friend in 1939: "I believe that all Germany's Jews are looking around the world, but can find nowhere to go."
This is the situation many face with the crime rate and poverty in Honduras. This is the situation many Syrians face as European cities try to absorb those fleeing the war. This is the situation that many face around the world as horror replaces everyday life and nation’s are ruled by turmoil and terror rather than public servants. During WWII American Immigration policy in the name of National Security became so stringent that children were refused admission to the United States. The Frank children died in a death camp. If her father’s application had not been denied, Anne Frank’s Diary would probably have only been her first book. She might be a 70+ year of naturalized American citizen living in Mass. today with a body of work behind her which touched hearts and inspired many generations of Americans. I know her Dairy touched me. I still remember most of it sixty years after I first read it.
In closing, I am acutely aware of how important it is for us to be discerning, to distinguish fact from fiction, to not allow fear to overrule compassion and to not allow compassion to unduly endanger us. There must be a balance between policies which label victims as criminals and those which are so overly restrictive that their enforcement means certain death for the innocent and vulnerable. American policy rejected admission of the Frank children to safety in the United States, leading to their deaths in a German death camp, citing the possibility that some relative of a refugee remaining in Europe might be used as a spy for the Nazi’s.
Fear is a paralyzing force. It sometimes comes from being touched by evil. Other times it prompts us to be overreaching in our denial of refuge and kindness,
When political leaders play on our fear or prejudice to gain power, inciting people to greater selfishness and hatred, as we have witnessed this year in the 2016 Presidential Election, it takes on a life force of its own. We have to be careful if we are to remain alive and we must be wary not to allow fear to rob us of active compassion if we are to remain human.