Opinion

The other barbarians

While a new exhibition commemorates the worst genocide in history, it helps explain how “educated” leftists refuse to understand what genocide means.

Anne Frank. Credit: Anne Frank House.
Anne Frank. Credit: Anne Frank House.
Karen Lehrman Bloch
Karen Lehrman Bloch
Karen Lehrman Bloch is editor in chief of White Rose Magazine.

Not all barbarians dress like terrorists.

That was what kept running through my mind as I wandered last week through the world premiere of “Anne Frank, The Exhibition” at the Center for Jewish History in New York. Opening on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, which this year was the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it’s the first full-scale replica of Anne Frank’s annex.

The 7,500-square-foot, multimedia installation was created by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam in collaboration with the history center. While the annex remains empty of original Frank family items (at Otto Frank’s request), the reconstruction contains more than 100 original artifacts—furniture, friendship albums, correspondence, a Torah—from the eight Jews who hid there for two years from July 1942 to August 1944.

The installation, which will be up through April 30, traces the Frank family from the 1920s in Frankfurt, Germany, through their flight to Amsterdam in 1934. Visitors explore five shadowy rooms, whose exact dimensions were copied from the annex—down to the covered windows and bits of peeling wallpaper. A map of Europe, glowing beneath a glass floor, depicts the locations of every concentration camp, and every site of genocide is marked with a small flag.

The array of signs in Dutch prohibiting Jews from entrance—“No entry for Jews,” “Jews forbidden,” “Jews not allowed” and “Jews not Dutch”—is particularly jarring.

After being deported, Anne and her older sister, Margot, died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, just months before the end of the war in Europe in May 1945. Of the eight Jews who hid in the annex, only Otto Frank survived. Miep Gies, who had assisted the group with food and other support during their time in hiding, had preserved Anne’s writings and shared them with him. A Dutch publisher first released a version of the diary in 1947.

The exhibition also includes displays of 79 published editions of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, which has been translated into dozens of languages and sold more than 30 million copies.

Otto Frank had requested that the spaces of the annex, plundered by the Nazis, remain vacant—their barrenness attesting to the murder of 75% of Dutch Jews. One could take issue with the re-creation, just as one could take issue with publishing the full diary against his wishes. But after Oct. 7, 2023—the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—when many seemingly intelligent people refuse to see it as such, one imagines that Otto Frank would be focused on getting as many people to see it as possible. More than 250 school tours have already been booked.

At the same time, one can’t help but point out the fact that the original annex admits 1.2 million visitors annually, while Amsterdam these days is boiling with antisemitism.

Which brings us back to the fact that not all barbarians dress like terrorists. I do believe that part of the shock of the post-Oct. 7 reaction stems from our own forgetting of centuries of pre-Hamas persecution.

After the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe how ordinary people can commit evil acts by “just following orders.” Her thesis was that evil can become banal when it’s systematic and unthinking—when ordinary people participate in it without care or choice. 

Arendt was admonished for her book, and in my opinion, rightly so. One just has to look at the photos of well-dressed Germans savagely and gleefully beating Jews in the streets or the films shot by British and American soldiers upon liberating the camps to see the superficiality of her theory. The soldiers found corpses with eyes gouged out, bodies split open and remnants of barbaric experimentation. Even more telling, when soldiers took groups of “ordinary” Germans to see the camps for themselves, the expressions on their faces were often not of horror but of complacency.

Germans at the time considered themselves highly educated. But education doesn’t necessarily track with civilized behavior; Marxists also consider themselves highly educated. The fact is, the “good German” is a myth. The only good Germans were the ones who hid Jews and otherwise helped save Jews, not the ones “following orders.”

While this exhibition commemorates the worst genocide in history, it also helps to explain how contemporary “educated” leftists can refuse to understand what the word genocide means, even as they try to repeat it. And in Europe, there’s a good chance that the grandparents of today’s violent rioters were herding humans into gas chambers 80 years ago.

Some Germans took their own lives so they wouldn’t be forced to perform barbaric acts on innocents. Sadly, that’s one of the few civilized responses to evil. It’s a response we never hear about in the Islamic world. This set of enemies has been taught since birth to hate and kill Jews as they believe it’s religiously sanctioned.

Sophie Scholl, a student leader of the White Rose resistance group during the Holocaust, was also religiously motivated to do everything possible to alert the world to what the Nazis were doing. “Laws change,” she said. “Conscience doesn’t.”

Scholl faced the Nazi guillotine for telling the truth. She was only a few years older than Anne Frank. Anything that excuses barbarism in any of its forms merely mocks the righteousness of those who live their lives doing good deeds and bravely calling out evil. It’s not pleasant to think that gleeful savagery will no doubt return with every generation. But understanding this truth is the only way to move forward.

The opinions and facts presented in this article are those of the author, and neither JNS nor its partners assume any responsibility for them.
Topics