Bleeding Edge

Anne Frank’s diary is arguably the best little book ever if we care about Human Beings…

Yet even those of us who know these things — we tend to forget that it was a simple person with unprepossessing qualities that saved this little book, Anne’s diary.

Miep Gies — who is pictured herewith her husband, by the movable bookcase that hid Anne Frank’s secret annex — risked her life to hide Anne, her family, and four other Jews for over two years.

After the Frank family was arrested, it was Gies who saved Anne’s diary and kept it safe until after the war.

Now this documentary of life in hiding from the Gestapo and the SS, while under the National Socialist party of Germany – has been published in more than 120 national languages, commemorating the role of the Human Spirit rising in the face of Evil and although Anne Frank was murdered by the SS in the Concentration camps of the “Final Solution” her memory lives forever.

Many Gentiles, Jews and even Germans, have called Anne Frank’s diaries, a book of Modern Ethics.

I call Anne Frank our Consciousness and her diaries, a guidepost for Humanity. I’ve given it to all of my children when they were as tall as a trike and learning how to read. My parents gave it to me when I was a three year old precocious reader, and I’ve gone back to it time and again over the years.

It is indeed my favorite Hanukkah gift for all my friend’s children and young relatives, and I am always surprised that the majority of them, like my nephews and nieces have never read it on the principle of not wanting to be bothered with the darkness of the diaries and the lost life of a little Jewish girl in Amsterdam under Germany’s benevolent occupation that saw full employment for the Dutch, the Germans and all other occupied peoples of Europe and beyond… (Sick)

Of course it has to do with the direction they get from their parents who completely deny their Jewishness for fear of Antisemitism in America and for wanting to pass as pure WHITES like all their hockey mad playing friends who would rather spend a whole day getting stoned and playing Fortnight on the video game machines than reading a book that might threaten to open up their mind.

And of course then you have their father who thinks that the whole thing is a conspiracy by the Jews to gain sympathy from the English speaking victors of the Second World War, in order to be allocated a Homeland in their ancestral land of Palestine and Eretz Israel, going on to live amongst two Billion Arabs who hate them with a passion, and want to eject them from there…

But I would expect nothing less from a man who is an atheist of primitive Athabaskan heritage, and Canadian dentist, with a bit of Irish blood in the mix, and who thinks that he can get away with murder literally, if that murder is committed against somebody he and his fisherman brother hated because of the victim’s religious beliefs and the fact that he was an Alaskan Anchorage preacher Pastor Glover, killed in Mexico in 1983 by the two Jones brothers from Anchorage, who hated him because he elevated their sister to a person of faith.

The two Jones brothers couldn’t stand to see their sister Terry Jones being a person of faith, so they saw their opportunity to murder Pastor Glover on a dark highway outside Mexico City, in a drive by shooting, the kind that they like seeing in the movies where the thugs that they see, are getting away with murder, never get caught and live high on the hog for the rest of their lives, out of their criminal loot.

In an unrelated scenario this person self medicates with alcohol and drugs so hard in order to forget their crime that you know their fear of judgement in the eternal purgatory is their primary reason for truing to stay in this side of the vellum of eternity…

Talk about Stupid fascists and Neo-Nazis still being the average white-trash hockey fans of America and Canada.

And that pretty much describes things as they stand today in Seattle with all the kraken idiots and their kin.

Bloody shame…

And there you have it.

Then again on the other side you have the haters who have the strong Jewish macho-men attitude that says that if Anne Frank’s father was a fighting man — he would have saved his family from destruction…

These Haganah types that to this day believe that the nice businessman could even wield a weapon or the ultra polite Jewish Doctor and his family, or the neighborhood accountant, etc etc.

But nobody objected and thus the story went on to where the Evil was so deep that it shuttered any sense of society, or as Pastor Niemoller said:

“First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me”

–Martin Niemöller

Well, so much for that crap.

Eleanor Roosevelt called Anne Frank’s diary “one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read.”

Born on this day in Vienna in 1909, Gies moved in with a foster family in the Netherlands to escape food shortages in Austria following WWI. In 1933, she began working for Anne’s father, Otto Frank, as a secretary and soon became close friends with the family.

After Anne’s older sister, Margot, received a summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany, the Frank family went into hiding. Gies, along with a few other employees, concealed them in secret rooms in the office building where they worked — a hiding place now famously known as the Secret Annex.

Gies and her husband also hid an anti-Nazi university student in their own apartment. As she didn’t dare tell anyone, not even her foster parents, of her activities, Gies developed a system for acquiring food and other supplies surreptitiously, so that no one would suspect she was shopping for more than just her own family.

Over the two years the Franks were in hiding, Gies developed a close friendship with the teenage Anne. The hiding place was discovered after the German police received a tip about the existence of the Secret Annex and everyone hiding there was arrested.

Gies went to the police station and attempted to buy their freedom but sadly without success. The effort could have cost her more than money: Gies could have been executed for hiding Jews — in fact two others, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, who helped hide the Franks were arrested and sent to work camps. Fortunately, the police officer who interrogated Gies discovered she was from his home town in Austria and let her go.

Before the Secret Annex was emptied by the police, Gies retrieved Anne’s diaries and hid them in her desk drawer. When the war was over, Gies turned the diaries over to the family’s only survivor, Otto Frank. She didn’t read them until the second printing and remarked that if she had read them during the war, she would have had to destroy them as they included the names of those who hid the Franks and of their black market suppliers.

Gies, who is pictured here with her husband Jan during a visit to the Anne Frank House in 1987, died in 2010 at the age of 100. While she has been widely honored for her actions during the war, including by the Netherlands, Germany, Israel, and Austria, Gies didn’t consider what she did extraordinary; rather she hoped that her actions showed that “even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room.”

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

Best we remember this brave person, because as Anti-Semitism is growing in our Country today and Hate Crimes are going on every day in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest and most of them perpetuated by the Police that is supposed to protect us — such as the infamous Seattle Police Racist Chiefs and Captains Steven Strand, Kevin Grossman, Martin Riviera, Adrian Diaz, Jeff Thompson, and a whole lot of others who are racists and white supremacists and have no place in our Communities — let alone leading inside our Police Department I. Seattle.

So, it might be good to share this story with as many others as you see fit, so that we can teach people the lessons that come with this righteous People’s story — in the hope that we shall not repeat the errors of our past so that our children and their children do not have to experience another Holocaust in the future, since history tends to repeat itself.

And although this is a tall order — besides prayers and civic action, there are a few simple steps you can take, that will assist us by teaching the next generation of American children that “all people are created equal” not as nice words in the Constitution, but as a preamble to gaining the requisite value of being a simple, honorable, & gentle Human Being, doing your duty to be worthy of the name HUMAN…

N’ est pas?

So, if you choose to accept this Mission — here are some educational aides and books that will assist you to introduce children to Miep Gies’ heroic story, we highly recommend the inspiring picture book “Miep and the Most Famous Diary” for ages 6 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/miep-and-the-most-famous-diary

For adult readers, Gies’ story is told in her excellent autobiography: “Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family” at https://www.amightygirl.com/anne-frank-remembered

For many books for children and teens about girls and women who lived during the Holocaust period, including stories of other heroic resisters and rescuers, visit our blog post, “60 Mighty Girl Books About The Holocaust” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11586

To introduce children and teens to Anne Frank’s story, you can find numerous books about her for all ages in our blog post “Hope in a Hidden Room: 15 Books About Anne Frank” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12110

For several books for young readers about more heroic Holocaust rescuers, we recommend “The Butterfly” for ages 5 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-butterfly), “The Whispering Town” for ages 6 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-whispering-town), “Irena’s Children: A True Story of Courage” for ages 10 to 14 (https://www.amightygirl.com/irena-s-children-young-readers), and “The Light in Hidden Places” for ages 13 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-light-in-hidden-places)

And, for adults who love to read about heroic women of WWII, you can find more of the best fiction and non-fiction books in our blog post, “Telling Her Story: 40 Books for Adult Readers About Women Heroes of WWII,” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=24501