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HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK
Anne Frank's life and death spanned the most critical years in the history of the Third Reich
and the Holocaust. Anne Frank was four years old when Hitler came to power.
LEGACY OF ANNE FRANK
The Diary of Anne Frank, published in Amsterdam in 1947, was one of the earliest written
accounts to introduce the world to one family's experience during the tragic years of Nazi
tyranny.
World War II saw millions of people killed during battles and bombings. Innocent men,
women and children were systematically stripped of their rights and sent to their deaths.
During the Holocaust, six million of those killed were Jewish and over one million were
children under the age of sixteen. Anne Frank was one of them.
Anne Frank's diary has enduring significance as one important document among many other
moving, important memoirs and accounts published post-1945. Students will relate to her
attitudes and feelings. Like so many young people today, Anne wanted to be independent
and respected for who she was, not what others wanted her to be. Anne's reflections from
1942-44 on her growth from a girl to a young woman and her insights on social and political
themes resonate to people today.
Anne struggled to stay hopeful in the face of despair. She wanted to be a writer and "bring
enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met." (April 5, 1944) She left us a powerful
story about growing up in a time of war and genocide. Her legacy challenges each of us to
ask today: What can we do to challenge prejudice and discrimination within ourselves and in
our schools, family, society? Do we look the other way or are we willing to take a stand
against intolerance and violence? In the face of a world where people are discriminated
against based on race, religion, ethnic background, gender, sexual orientation and mental or
physical abilities, how can each of us work to eliminate discrimination and hatred? How can
we create in our lives a community where the dignity of human life is valued and where
differences strengthen rather than tear apart our communities.
WAR AND THE 20th CENTURY
The 20th century is often characterized as a century of total war and mass death. From
1914-18, the First World War, and again from 1939-45, World War II, the tools and ideologies
of the modern era, such as nationalism, bureaucracy and technology were harnessed toward
killing on a mass scale. As Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States described, WWI
was the "war to end all wars," and resulted in the death of over 8.5 million people in battle,
millions of civilian losses, including the state sanctioned genocide by the Turkish government
of the Armenian people, the break-up of empires, massive dislocation, and revolution among
"civilized" nations. In recent years, we have witnessed war and mass killing through ethnic
cleansing in the former state of Yugoslavia and mass death in Rwanda.
After WWI, the League of Nations was established as an international peace body. The
victors, including Britain, France, and the United States, signed a series of complex peace
settlements including the Treaty of Versailles in which the principle of self-determination was
unevenly applied and national self-interest along with fear of communism came first. Not
since 1815 had the map of Europe been so extensively re-drawn with the end of the German,
Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires and the creation of new countries such as
Poland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania. The treaty the Allies presented to Germany in May
1919 as an ultimatum included the statement that Germany alone had been responsible for
the war’s outbreak, severe reduction of German army and navy, reparations, and loss of
overseas colonies as well as Posen, Alsace-Lorraine, etc. Before the ink was dry on the
peace treaties, it was clear that the cycles of violence between nations and minorities was
only temporarily halted.
THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC: AN EXPERIMENT IN DEMOCRACY
For the first time in their history, Germany after the First World War was a republic, but the
Weimar government never gained widespread support. German military victories and
effective war propaganda contributed to the shock many Germans felt when they found out
they had lost the war. They were further angered by the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty
including loss of territory, the war guilt clause and payment of reparations. The death of over
two million German soldiers in World War I, end of the German Empire and signing of the
peace treaty by civilian leaders all contributed to the popularity of the dochstosslegend, stab
in the back theory. This scapegoat myth claimed the Germans had not been defeated on the
battlefield but stabbed in the back by enemies within and was central to Hitler’s vicious
attacks on the Weimar Republic, Social Democrats, Communists, Jews and others as traitors
to the German people.
There was a period of prosperity in the 1920's and cultural accomplishments, but the Weimar
government was unstable as it struggled to maintain a pluralist society, at times cooperating
with the military to put down political opposition. World-wide depression, unemployment, and
inflation along with political instability and outrage at the Versailles Treaty, all added to the
general unrest. Unlike the U.S. system, Weimar had a multi-party system where political
parties battled each other for support. Disillusionment with liberalism and democracy, along
with fear of communist revolution and political and economic crises all contributed to the
growth of fascist parties in the inter-war years from Italy to Hungary to Germany and Spain.
In Germany, fascism came to power under the leadership of Adolf Hitler and the National
Socialist German Workers’ Party(NSDAP).
THE NAZI RISE TO POWER
The Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, founded in 1920, began as a small radical
party. The Nazis, as they have become known, wanted to abolish the Versailles Treaty and
to end the Weimar democracy. They promised to restore territory, honor and greatness to
Germany. Anti-Semitism was central to their platform early on and for the 1921 election they
attacked the Jews, who made up less than 1% of the population. "None but members of the
nation may be citizens of the state. None but those of German Blood, whatever their creed,
may be members of the nation. No Jew therefore may be a member of the nation."(The
Weimar Republic Source book, eds. Kaes, Jay and Dimendberg, UCa Press, 1994)
Adolf Hitler became leader of the party and early on dictated his world-view of Nazi
domination in Mein Kampf(My Struggle,1924 ). Hitler’s autobiography includes central tenets
of Nazism: constant attacks on the Jews as parasites and betrayers of the German people;
stab in the back theory; the importance of a Fuhrer(leader) to have supreme authority, the
use of propaganda and terror, the purity of the Aryan race as superior to all other races, the
need for lebensraum(living space)for Germans in the east, and the hatred of communism
and democracy. The economic crash in 1929, along with unemployment and poverty,
resulted in decline in support for democratic parties and growth of support for radical
solutions. 37% of the German people who voted in 1932 supported the Nazis making them
the largest single party. With the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the
Nazis began to consolidate power and to destroy political opposition through terror and laws.
By 1937, the Nazi dictatorship was in control and ruled Germany until 1945.(see Yehuda
Bauer and Nili Keren, A History of the Holocaust, Franklin Watts).
NAZI ANTI-SEMITISM
Why the Jews? While some who voted for the Nazis in 1932 did not support the party’s antiSemitic platform, over time anti-Semitism would become central to Hitler and the Nazi party’s
plan for world domination. Representing them as "parasites" and "vermin," Nazi propaganda
made scapegoats of the Jews as evil and a threat to the Aryan race and urged the need to
strip them of their rights. By making the Jews non-human, Jews no longer were within the
human "universe of moral obligation."(see Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide, Free Press).
As anti-Semitic propaganda became more violent, Der Sturmer, the Nazi paper, reached
millions of Germans with its slogan: "The racial problem is the key to world
history."(Antisemitism: A History Portrayed, Anne Frank Foundation, Amsterdam, 1993).
Eliminating the racial problem came to mean eliminating the Jews.
Anti-Semitism became a central part of the Nazi campaign for world-wide domination through
mass propaganda, terrorist acts and anti-Semitic laws first in Germany and then in Austria.
Other enemies of the Third Reich who were persecuted included political opponents, social
democrats, communists, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Through a euthanasia
program, doctors killed Germans institutionalized for mental or physical disabilities. From the
economic boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933 to the dismissal of non-Aryans from
the civil service on April 7, the Nazis enacted hundreds of pieces of anti-Semitic legislation
by the late 1930's segregating Jews from all aspects of German life. The 1935 Nuremberg
laws, ‘for the protection of German blood and honor’ were unanimously passed by the
Reichstag (German Parliament) and defined who was a Jew, legally defining them as noncitizens and stateless people. From not being allowed to attend German schools or associate
with Germans to being forced out of jobs and to register, the Nazis systematically stripped
Jews of their rights and isolated them.
WORLD WAR II AND THE HOLOCAUST
Withdrawal from the League of Nations(1933), a successful rearmament program, military
conscription and occupation of the demilitarized Rhineland were among the steps Hitler
directed to implement his plan for world domination. Other European states taken up with
alliances and fearful of communism looked the other way as the Nazis annexed Austria and
then the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia. By March 15, 1939, German armies occupied
Bohemia and Moravia making clear that the policy of appeasement that British Prime
Minister Chamberlain described as "peace in our time" was disastrous.
Hitler was anything but "peace in our time." Secret negotiations between Germany and
Russia resulted in the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August with its secret protocol for partition of
Poland.
As part of Hitler’s goal of creating an Aryan empire, the German Army invaded Poland on
September 1, 1939 and on September 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war. World War
II had begun. In contrast to World War I, World War II was truly global. Warring nations would
mount major campaigns in Europe, North Africa and East and Southeast Asia as well as in
the western Pacific. The Allied Powers included Britain, France, and eventually 26 nations
including the Soviet Union and the United States, which entered the war after Japan bombed
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 . The Axis powers included Germany, Italy, Japan and
their allies. There were tremendous military losses on all sides and mass civilian deaths that
targeted so-called, inferior and subhuman races, political opponents and others. Just as the
genocide against the Armenians took place within the larger cover of World War I, the
genocide against the Jews was to take place within the even larger conflagration of World
War II. Hitler is reported to have said, "Who today speaks about the Armenians?" The Jews
were targeted for total destruction. The Nazis waged this war against the Jews with little fear
of reprisal and succeeded in destroying two out of every three Jews in Europe---six million
people.
The Polish army fought the German military for over three weeks surrendering September
27, 1939 and the next day the Nazi and Soviet governments divided Poland. The Nazi racial
world-view saw the Polish people as part of the Slavic race, a so-called inferior people. The
Nazis murdered around 10,000 Polish intellectuals, leaders, priests and tens of thousands of
other Poles were forced into slave labor for the Nazi war machine.
POLISH JEWRY AND THE WARSAW GHETTO
Approximately, 3.3 million Jews lived in prewar Poland. 120,000 Jews were killed in the first
months as soldiers in the Polish army, in bombing or as victims of the mobile killing
units.(see Bauer, History of the Holocaust). Some Jews fled; others were killed and over one
million found themselves under Soviet rule. Almost 2 million Jews were caught and under
Nazi control. In November,1939, Jews in Poland were forced to wear a yellow star with the
word "Jew" written in the center. Jews were forcibly removed from smaller towns and villages
and sent to ghettos in major cities, such as Lodz, Warsaw, and Krakow, where they were
isolated and interned under dehumanizing conditions.(see Chaim Kaplan, Scroll of Agony:
Diaries of the Warsaw Ghetto, Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed. The Chronicles of the Lodz Ghetto)
The Warsaw ghetto was an area of two square miles where 450,000 Jews from Warsaw and
surrounding areas were herded together and isolated from the rest of the city by an eight foot
wall. Jews were deprived of their rights and reduced to a terrible existence; food was
rationed to about 170-270 calories per day; in 1941, 43,000 Jews died of starvation. Daily
bloated bodies were found in the streets; epidemics, such as typhoid and cholera ravaged
the ghetto. For example, Adam Czerniakow, leader of the Warsaw Judenrat (Jewish
Council), describes in his diary the terrible conditions and moral and bureaucratic nightmare
of daily life in the ghetto. On the second day of mass deportations, he realized that the Nazis
were emptying out the entire ghetto and killed himself. In Warsaw and in other ghettos,
armed resistance took place. By September 330,000 Jews had been deported to Treblinka
extermination camp. The Warsaw ghetto uprising went on for a month, and the Nazis set fire
to the ghetto, shooting or deporting its inhabitants. A small number of people were able to
escape through underground sewers or by passing into the Polish sector.
THE ALLIES AND AXIS POWERS AT WAR
In Western Europe, on April 9, 1940, the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway and a
month later on May 10 launched an attack overrunning Holland and Belgium. They then
launched a massive armored attack through a gap in Sedan, France breaking through the
Allied front. The British army from May 26-June 4 staged a massive evacuation at Dunkirk. In
the summer, 1940, the Germans launched the Battle of Britain but failed to destroy the British
air force and by winter, 1941 it was clear Britain would continue in the war. In June 24, 1940,
France surrendered and Hitler chose the same place and same railroad car where the
Germans had signed the armistice in 1918. The Nazis controlled much of Western Europe.
The Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis was formalized in September 27, 1940 and strengthened by
Hungary, Rumania and Slovakia joining them. Country after country was under Nazi
occupation. The Nazis established ghettos, transit camps and forced labor camps in addition
to the concentration camps. They rounded up and deported massive numbers of prisoners,
including political opponents, resistance, fighters, Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s
witnesses and other victims of Nazi racial and political policies.
On June 12, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union; Operation Barbarossa, as it was
called, was to prove a turning point in the course of the war. Eventually, the German military
would be turned back at Stalingrad. After tremendous destruction and loss of life; the
Russian military effort proved crucial for the Allies victory. Millions of Russian soldiers,
civilians and prisoners of war perished; many from disease, starvation and forced labor. As
the German military overran large sections of Eastern Europe, an additional 2 million Jews,
many of whom had fled from earlier Nazi invasions, were caught in the Nazi net. The Nazis
now implemented a new step with the use of mobile killing units. The Einsatzgruppen, or
special units of the SS, were set up and moved directly behind the advance units of the
German army. Once an area was occupied, the German military identified and isolated the
Jews. With the arrival of the Einsatzgruppen, Jewish men, women and children were
marched to pits, lined up and shot; others were killed in mobile gas vans. With the help of
local populations, the Einsatzgruppen murdered 1,500,000 Jewish civilians on the Eastern
front.(see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jewry).
THE FINAL SOLUTION
Hitler was master of the continent of Europe by autumn, 1941 and used his power to carry
out his demonic vision of a "New Order." At the center was the Greater German nation which
would be the homeland of the superior Aryan race. Through slave labor and stripping
occupied countries of their resources for the German war effort, this new order
would allow the Aryans to dominate, and the inferior, such as Slavs and Asiatic to be
reduced to serfs. The Jews, however were another matter, they were to be totally destroyed.
In January, 1942 at Wannsee in Berlin, Nazi and government leaders met to discuss how to
implement the Endlosung, ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question. As early as 1933,
concentration camps had been established to incarcerate those opposed to the Nazi regime.
The first one, Dachau, was opened in 1933 and by 1939 many more existed such as
Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Flossenburg and Mauthausen for men and Ravensbruck for
women. In order to carry out "the final solution" the camp system was enlarged and research
done to most quickly and efficiently get rid of "excess people." The networks of camps
included transit camps, extermination camps, and large concentrations camps such as
Majdanek and Auschwitz. The labor demand of the German armament and other industries
became so great by 1941 that the Nazis decided to use able-bodied Jewish and other camp
inmates as slave labor. Prisoners were worked until they were no longer useful and then put
to death. Each main concentration camp was allocated a network of new erected camps. By
one estimate the total of camps in this nightmare system numbered more than 5,000 all over
Europe.
Six killing centers were built mainly around the Lublin area in Poland: Belzec, Chelmno,
Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Just as the Nazis used the
euphemism "final solution" for killing Jews, so they mapped death camps in Poland where
they directly governed and felt they could best camouflage their destruction. Jews were
transported to these camps often in sealed cattle cars from central Poland, Western Europe,
Hungary and elsewhere. Nearly everyone was immediately killed at Chelmno, Sobibor,
Belzec and Treblinka. At Auschwitz and Majdanek, individuals were "selected" upon arrival to
live or die. Children, the elderly and people over 50 were among those immediately killed;
while those who appeared healthy were selected for slave labor and forced to work long
shifts with little food and clothing and few provisions. Five gas chambers were built in
Auschwitz-Birkenau as the Nazis developed quicker ways to kill prisoners. Some were lead
to "showers" where people were gassed and later cremated. From May 14 through July 8,
1944, Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz and killed in what was one of the last and
probably largest single mass deportation during the Holocaust. Some who survived selection
were used for medical experiments by German physicians. For those who were selected to
live, conditions were terrible, with crowding, lack of food and hygiene, disease rampant, and
constant roll-calls and terror.
How in the 20th century could a modern nation state direct mass murder? The Holocaust is
the name for the genocide against European Jewry from 1939-45 by the Nazi state and its
collaborators. Within the larger destruction of a world at war, there was a war against the
Jews. Why were so many people willing to be bystanders to genocide? Why did so many
people participate from the driver of the train to Majdanek to the engineer for the gas oven to
the bureaucrat recording the number of dead people’s gold fillings? Why were so many
people willing to collaborate, participate or be bystanders? Why was it; why today still can
people get away with mass killing of other people?
RESCUERS
While small in number, there were people throughout Europe who refused to join the Nazis
and some who had the courage to help others.(Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the
Darkness; Eva Fogelman, Conscience and Courage,) Resistance to Nazism was punishable
by death. From the example of Raoul Wallenbourg, the Swedish diplomat who saved
thousands of Hungarian Jews to those who provided food or hid people like Miep Gies and
the other helpers to residents of the little town of Le Chambon sur Lignon. These individuals
are a startling reminder that there were those few who had the courage to resist evil. There
were armed revolts by Jews in the death camps of Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz and
uprisings in Warsaw, Vilna and elsewhere. There were also those acts of solidarity from
sharing a piece of moldy bread in a camp to recording life in a ghetto to writing a diary under
Nazi occupation. Many parents faced the impossible decision of whether to try to find a
hiding place or escape for their child or children or keep the family together. The
extraordinary stories of those hidden children who survived is testimony to remarkable
courage. The controversial leaders, Czerniakow in Warsaw and Gens in Vilna faced with
terrible choices did "educate, feed and protect children out of proportion to their ghettos’
resources." (Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star) The will to live and maintain human
dignity in extremis, under extreme conditions, continued.(see Terrence des Pres, The
Survivor).
THE END OF THE WAR
Despite the fact that the Axis Powers were losing the war, the Nazis contiued their
deportations to killing centers to the very end. By 1944, the Allies clearly had substantial
information on the killings, but declined for example, to use military resources to bomb the
railroad lines to Auschwitz. As late as May-July, 1944, 430,000 Hungarian Jews were
deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau where most of them were immediately gassed. The question
of why the Allies failed to take direct action once they knew about the killing centers and
were winning the war remains unanswered. The question of why the Nazis continued to
wage their war against the Jews even as they were being defeated in part reveals how deep
their obsession with racial theory and hatred was and how the machinery of destruction once
harnessed---and participated in by so many different segments of the German state and its
collaborators ---accelerated its engine of killing almost to the very end. As the Allies reached
the occupied countries, the Nazis began to cover up evidence of genocide. On November 24,
1944, SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered the destruction of Auschwitz’s crematoria and the
removal of as many prisoners as possible as the Russians approached the camp. Prisoners
were forced to march on what became known as death marches toward central Germany to
prevent their liberation. Many inmates died from cold, hunger and exhaustion on the marches
and in the camps. Concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen where Anne and Margot
Frank died were death traps of disease and starvation and even after the camps were
liberated by the Allied armies, exhaustion and disease continued to take a terrible toll.
At the end of April, 1945, after the allied fire bombing of Dresden, when it was clear that
Germany had lost the war and he was about to be captured, Hitler committed suicide in his
bunker in Berlin. On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered and the war in Europe was over.
After two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. air force,
killing 200,000 Japanese August 8 and 9, the Japanese announced their surrender on
August 14 and with the official ceremony on September 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay, World War II
was finally over. The anti-Axis coalition had prevailed, but midst the images of victorious
allied soldiers and civilians liberated from occupation were juxtaposed the almost
unimaginable toll of five years of brutal war. Throughout the war, Allied leaders, met at
conference after conference to try to work toward goals for peace and reconstruction, but just
as after WWI, national interests and conflicts as well as where armies were on the ground,
were crucial in the drawing up post-World War II maps and political power structure. After
1945, the issues that were not settled at Yalta or other conferences, were accomplished by
fait accompli. The two major powers to emerge from the war, the United States and the
Soviet Union would turn from being allies to adversaries in the Cold War period, and nationstates would line up behind one side or the other. "Europe in 1945 was an even more
desolate landscape than it had been in 1918." Around 18 million civilians died from "bombing,
shelling, disease, malnutrition, overwork, and outright genocide between 1939-45."(Paxton,
Europe in the 20th Century). As the death camps were liberated, the world began to see
evidence of the magnitude and brutality of the Holocaust. Many camps were set up as
displaced person camps since many people had lost their families and had no place to go.
Also, thousands died from disease and malnutrition after the war; others stayed in displaced
persons camps trying to recover from the physical ravages of life in the camps. Those Jews
who tried to return to their pre-war homes were often greeted with hostility. For example,
there were anti-Semitic outbreaks in Poland, Italy, France and elsewhere. Civilians who had
suffered during the war had their own reasons for not welcoming Jews back, from not
wanting to return property that had belonged to Jews, to guilt at collaboration, and to
absorbing the racist Nazi propaganda.
Where did those who were liberated from the Nazi camps and occupation go? Across
Europe, two out of every three Jews who were alive in 1939 were dead. Jewish cultural
centers and communities across Europe were destroyed. Some Jews who were liberated
from camps returned to their pre-war communities. Many faced a wall of silence upon their
return; few people wanted to hear about the genocide; neither governments nor their citizens
wanted to acknowledge their role.
Some Jews were anxious to get out of Europe; those who had family in the United States
and elsewhere waited to get well enough and for papers to immigrate. Beside the aid of relief
organizations, the refugees had learned not to count on help from governments, and they
organized Bricah(Flight) to counter British restrictions on immigration to Palestine. Hundreds
of thousands of Jewish refugees were moved to Germany, Italy and Austria in a mass
movement with the goal of getting Jews to the coast and then by boat to enter Palestine
illegally. The survivors of Nazi genocide re-built their lives in Europe, Palestine, the United
States and throughout the world despite the terrible psychological, physical and economic
damage inflicted upon them. Through the extraordinary memoirs and diaries they have
written and in the last decades through their talking and providing testimony, they bear
witness to those who were killed, to their own lives and to the necessity of teaching next
generations what happens when hate and discrimination prevail and people remain
bystanders.
What happened to those who committed genocide?
Many people got away with it. Some Nazi leaders and perpetrators of the Holocaust were
tried and convicted; but the number is certainly far below the total of those who were
involved. During the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (1945-46) leading Nazis were prosecuted
under the unique charge of crimes against humanity . "The Tribunal...shall have the power to
try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, where as
individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes: crimes
against peace; war crimes; crimes against humanity." "Crimes against humanity" according
to Sec. 6c of the London Charter, namely murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation
and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war,
or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connections with
any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic
law of the country where perpetrated."
THE HOLOCAUST, POST-1945 GENOCIDE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights(1948) to the convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide(1948) to the Convention on the Rights of the
Child(1989), a series of crucial documents have been formulated in part as a reaction to WW
II and the Holocaust with the goal of creating international human rights norms.
Unfortunately, the United Nations has not been effective as the major international peace
keeping organization and, all too often, nations use human rights issues as tactics for their
own state interests. There has been tremendous growth from the 1970's on of nongovernmental organizations(ngos), such as Amnesty International, Child Rights International,
The Institute for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights Watch, working to protect human
life and rights. The challenge of effectively incorporating international human rights into
foreign policy decisions, reforming international agencies, having citizens put pressure on
their governments to support human rights and creating world wide prevention of and
prosecution of perpetrators of genocide remains very much with us today.
From the Ache of Paraguay to the people of East Timor and Cambodia, the former
Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the second half of the twentieth century has continued the patterns
of genocide. People and governments continue to get away not only with murder, but with
mass murder and victimization. The challenge of learning from the past and taking actions,
not being bystanders to genocide, remains central to our lives and our time.
Excerpt from The Diary of Anne Frank- a study guide to the play, © Anne Frank Center USA
and The Anne Frank Two Company, L.P. 1997, 1998