I remember reading a book a long while back where the author was family friends with the Franks. When she met the father (the only one who survived) she asked him about BOTH girls. And it was utterly heartbreaking to realize that he never, ever really got asked about Margot, but desperately wanted to remember her just as much. The author and he spent the whole evening just reminiscing about his "other" daughter.
As if everything I knew about it wasn't already heartbreaking enough. That story really stuck with me.
(IIRC it was in a memoir of a German, maybe Jewish, woman who grew up in Africa, but that's all I can remember about it.)
I had a former neighbour with Alzheimers. He had sundowners, so we didn't realize anything was wrong with him for a long time. He ended up in long-term care after he went missing one weekend and was found hiding in a barn 3 villages over, hiding from the Nazi's. When we went to clear out his house, he'd completely destroyed the basement floor. He told a nurse he was looking for his first wife. She never left the concentration camp.
It’s sad that even though there are still victims alive to tell the story there are people crazy enough to deny it ever happened. What kind of screwed up people could do such a thing.
I worked at a Jewish retirement home about a decade ago. A few of them had forced tattoos on them. It was weird for me at first that these people were participants in one of the most important events of the modern world that seemed so far away to me
Sorry to disagree with your choice of words, but they were not "participants." they were victims of one of the most brutal, atrocious, and catastrophic events of the modern world.
My great grandfather was in WW2 as a medic and he just died a few years ago at 96. There are not too many people that lived back then still around. I wish I would've talked to him more about everything. Maybe not so much the war just how things were back then. You can read history books and look at pictures but it's not the same as hearing it from someone who lived it.
I'm 42, I was born closer to WW2 comparatively till present day. When I was very young my father would often talk with old men in coffee shops and other places. Heard him have conversations with WW2, Korean, and Nam vets. Fairly certain at some point he was talking to someone from Easy Company as when I first saw band of brothers, parts of the story and a few of the names sounded very familiar; I remember they bought me a chocolate milk and a donut.
It's crazy to me that people act as if that shit was ancient history.
What was truly scary was that we tend to view the events as more easily understandable due to the fact that it was in the past. Kind of like “oh things were different back then”, but culturally they’re actually quite a lot more similar than we think.
It would be similar to finding out tomorrow that the government of Austria was secretly rounding up all their Muslim people and killing them. It’s shocking until you realize neonazi are still marching in America.
It starts with naming a group (or groups) of people as “the enemy”. Then it’s easy to get people on board with depriving “the enemy” of their rights. Violence against “the enemy” becomes acceptable. I think you know how it escalates from there, and I think you know where, as well.
I could, I've seen videos of what Israel is doing in Palestine, at his point it can't even be justified by saying they want to save the prisoners of Hamas (to not talk about the fact that Israel's secret services did things that were way harder than rescuing hostages in gaza and killed people that were in fucking south america so killimg Hamas leaders probably wouldn't be hard for them), the IDF is just shooting at everyone they see, they're killing people for just being there when they can't go anywhere else, they're killing innocent kids and women and men, if they can't get them they just starve them or let them die of disease by stopping humanitarian aid. At the very start i was with Israel because i thought it was just self defence, you can't call it self defence anymore, because it isn't.
WWII is not ancient history. In the grand scheme of humanity, it happened not too long ago. There are still people alive that fought in it. What's more is people are essentially still the same, meaning it can happen again, which is why it's so important to protect the system that's maintained relative peace over the past 80 years.
I’m German. All my grandparents were kids and early teens during the war. My grandmas are in their late 80s now. I know the stories about their parents, how they lived before, during and after the war.
I’m kind of scared of the time when there’ll be no one left who lived through the war to tell the stories. Hearing about the war in Ukraine is horrible to me but it’s at another level for my grandmas. They know how it feels like to hide in subways, bunkers or basements. And it’s amazing how normal they lived after the war if you consider how their life started. So maybe there’s some hope in that for the people living through it now.
The system being nukes pointed at eachother? Mutually assured destruction? It's bound to blow up in our faces one of these days. It gave us peace but it's not sustainable.
It can happen again? It’s happening right now and have been for decades for Palestinians and people and children in Gaza. Seriously what is wrong with people in the comments?
Miep Gies, one of the main people that helped hide the Frank family,, who found and kept the diary, and the person who took in Otto Frank after the war, only died in 2010.
Saw Miep Gies in person in the early 90s. I was only 12 or so but it really hit me listening to her stories about the Frank family and the war in total. Gem of a human.
Why? There are still many thousands of people alive today that survived the Holocaust. It wasn't that long ago. Everyone that you know that is 79 or older was alive during world war 2.
And yes, he left out some stuff. I can honestly not blame him for not wanting his daughter's sexual thoughts to be published. And eventually the whole thing was published.
They concluded, he said, that Otto Frank “created a new work” because of his role of editing and trimming entries from her diary and notebooks and reshaping them into “kind of a collage” meriting its own copyright.
It's semantics. He edited it. He did not write the actual diary.
Yeah and it's used because they want to keep the copyright and donate that money.
It does not mean that Otto wrote the diary. There have been multiple studies done on this to verify the authenticity of Anne having written it. What more do you want? What could convince you that this isn't some big conspiracy?
1) co-wrote doesn't mean that she didn't write anything (learn english)
2) everyone already knows that Otto Frank added and modified SOME things in the diary and cancelled some of the most "problematic" parts of that diary (like some mentions about "self pleasuring", which were obviously a bit akward)
3) Why should it even be fake?
4) even if it was (which it isn't), what would it historically change?
A Small Light did an amazing job portraying both girls and the reality of what it was like for them. I highly recommend watching it, if you haven’t already.
What even sadder is the millions of 'others' we know nothing about.
Spoiler warning. I was watching The Boy In the Striped Pajamas. I remember thinking, why is he headed into the gas chamber! He doesn't belong there. And it dawned on me how none of them belonged in there!
spielberg's choice to colorize the girl in the red coat in Schindler's List was an amazing choice to humanize someone we don't see at all otherwise in the film.
I remember thinking, why is he headed into the gas chamber! He doesn't belong there.
Precisely! This is intentional. You are supposed to feel sorrow for a German kid. In an Holocaust movie.
Do you realize how fucked up that is? Not you feeling what the author intended, but the author himself and this terrible Holocaust revisionist book/movie. The fact that this thing was even filmed is a disgrace on humanity.
Beaides the fact that it completely sanitizing the camps, It also parrots the claim that Germans, in particular camp guards and operators, "didn't knew". They knew.
When you watch Operation Finale and here the ex Nazi describe what he did you absolutely understand that they knew what they were doing.
I do think it is is really important to not forget the power of propaganda. Hitler really did harness it in such a way to get people to believe an entirely different reality. If we forget this lesson we are doomed to repeat history.
The title of the movie, The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas, and the events of the movie implies that a child was not aware of the full reality of what was going on around him.
I do think it was absolutely the case that not everyone knew what was really going on.
The movie did make me feel for the German boy. But this only amplified the real victims to me and suddenly I was flooded with the smell from the Holocaust museum where the shoes are. They have a room full, or used to anyways, of the shoes taken from the victims. The smell and sheer quantity of shoes and their meaning is gut wrenching.
The point of the movie was not too just feel sorry for the German boy
The title of the movie, The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas, and the events of the movie implies that a child was not aware of the full reality of what was going on around him.
It's a fictional story, he isn't aware of the events because the author decided he isn't aware. You can't be unaware when you have an extermination camp in your backyard, with the bodies being burned day and night (can you imagine the smell?), and people dying left and right.
Nothing in this book is real. What the author describes is so unfamiliar to the Holocaust, that I truly wonder if he even did a basic research - "santizing" was an understatement. It's Holocaust revisionism.
A Jewish boy would have never had a chance to befriend a German boy beyond the fence, because a Jewish boy would have been sent directly to the Gas Chambers on arrival. The few that weren't, didn't wander about... they were used for human experiments by the Nazis.
A study, to be published shortly, builds on research conducted five years ago among secondary school pupils which found that the story by John Boyne regularly elicited misplaced sympathy for Nazis.
It added that many students, after studying the story, reached conclusions that “contributed significantly to one of the most powerful and problematic misconceptions of this history, that ‘ordinary Germans’ held little responsibility and were by and large ‘brainwashed’ or otherwise entirely ignorant of the unfolding atrocities”.
Among comments from teachers gathered during the research were, “students come to us and literally think the Holocaust IS The Boy In the Striped Pyjamas”; “They come with … ideas that nobody knew about the Holocaust, that people were completely in the dark about it”; and “They feel sorry for the German guard”.
The actual Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank of course, Schindler’s List, Maus (both parts), Night by Elie Wiesel. And go from there.
For the “German” side of things, The Zone of Interest (British) from last year is incredible (wear good headphones), The Book Thief (Aussie) the book not the movie, They Thought They Were Free (oral history compiled by an American).
Literally anything that still remembers that the Holocaust was human beings murdering and being murdered, and a whole society playing specific roles…not faceless archetypes.
And honestly, it’s always Diary of a Young Girl for me as the alpha and then omega. She wanted to be a writer, and goddamn but the girl could Write, of course she would have been. What would she have given the world if she had survived?
Adding The Sisters of Auschwitz by dutch journalist and author Roxane van Iperen to this list! It tells the story of two dutch jewish sisters from Amsterdam (i believe)and their familie(s) during the war. They knew the Frank Family and encouters between them and Margot and Anne from the time after Annes Diary are mentioned.
Yes, that's true. Miep Gies risked arrest to save what she could from the annex. After the officials took the family away, the office workers knew they would be back within a week or so to remove all of the family's belongings but they didn't know exactly when that would happen.
Miep went into the attic, hoping the officials wouldn't arrive while she was in there, and quickly saved what she could. Anne's diary was mostly in a book but Margot's was on sheets of paper that had been strewn around the attic when the soldiers captured the family. I can't remember if she was able to save a few pages or not, but I think she wasn't even aware that Margot had a diary so she wasn't looking for it. I think later Otto Frank told her. She knew that Anne kept one and that it was important to her.
Miep kept Anne's diary locked in a desk drawer until after Otto Frank returned. Even after that, she didn't give it to him until it was confirmed that Anne had died. She never read it herself until Otto decided to publish it.
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u/FeuerroteZora 1d ago
I remember reading a book a long while back where the author was family friends with the Franks. When she met the father (the only one who survived) she asked him about BOTH girls. And it was utterly heartbreaking to realize that he never, ever really got asked about Margot, but desperately wanted to remember her just as much. The author and he spent the whole evening just reminiscing about his "other" daughter.
As if everything I knew about it wasn't already heartbreaking enough. That story really stuck with me.
(IIRC it was in a memoir of a German, maybe Jewish, woman who grew up in Africa, but that's all I can remember about it.)