Holocaust

I was struck by the crafted words of a journalist reporting on today's commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz:  Those who survived Auschwitz lived through one of the 20th Century's worst acts of hatred and inhumanity.

 

In a world where hype so often hides the truth here is the truth: one of one century's worst.

 

In fact the importance of marking today in our thoughts is not because it was unthinkably bad but because the inhumanity of the Nazis toward the Jews and others is repeatable.  The industrial, secret and targeted scale of it sets it apart, but only in degree.  I witnessed the fears that surround this still in one of my earlier blogs.

Protection for Frankfurt's Synagogue - today

We call it inhumanity because we do not want to think of it as human.  But it is absolutely human.  What other created species sets about its own in such a way?  Certainly none with any moderately developed intelligence.

I like the optimism in the word inhumanity.  I like it but I'm not sure I entirely believe it.  Humanity's best hope lies, I think, in the Man from Heaven.

Anne Frank

There are few more haunting places in Western Europe than Anne Frank's House in Amsterdam.
 

That is not to say that there are not worse places.  Massacres have littered the history of Europe; massacres on battlefields, in gas chambers, on hillsides and God knows where else.  Europe, whilst being a very nice continent to live as supplied by God through Mother Nature has also been turned into killing fields very many times and the sites are there to visit (together with a Tourist Office of course).

 

Anne Frank's house touristic too.  Annexes have turned it into a veritable museum and although there is a reality about it in some ways there is also a sense (with the Restaurant and Bookshop at the end)  that this could have been recreated from scratch in, say, Las Vegas.

 

Except for me it couldn't.

 

When we visited it on our vacation it was not the House itself that haunted me - though it is despairingly poignant.  It was just one (black and white of course) picture combined with our experience of visiting.
 

Duly warned, we had turned up early - a very strong recommendation given that there was an eye-poppingly long line waiting by the time we exited.  We lined up for no more than ten minutes and next to the canal and the Great Western Church we watched the cyclists scuttle by, the barges and boats glide past under a summer's sky.

The haunting black and white picture in the House was of exactly the same kind of Amsterdam canalside scene.  Only this time there were Nazi security forces and a line of Jewish families being rounded up for deportation.  The same canals, churches, sunshine, and another line of people out on the street.  These apparently glorious delights buried beneath human hatred.

That a setting that delighted me was a terror to Anne Frank: that I was pleased to linger in a place that she was for years terrified to step into; this showed me that the human heart is far more important than architecture, church buildings, summer weather and lining up.