The students of 2nd year 4th division went to visit the replica of Anna Frank House built here, in Buenos Aires, on October, Friday 9th, 2009.
Anna was a Jewish teenager who fled with her family from Nazi Germany to establish in Amsterdaam (Holland), country that also fell under Nazi occupation and, because of the persecution that totalitariaa régime did of Jews and other minorities it deemed to be inferior or dangerous, Anna, her family and another Jewish family went into hiding in a house located behind Anna’s father’s, Otto, factory, that he, who already knew what had happened to Jews in Germany, had secretly transformed into a hideout when Germany invaded Holland.
During her stay in that house, Anna wrote all her feelings, worries and thoughts in a diary her parents had given her a long time before. There are people who say that this very action, the gift of a diary instead of any other thing a girl her age might have wanted, is a true display of how Coincidence may play a crucial role in history, because had it not been for the diary (she called it “Kitty”, because she wrote on it treating it as if it were a human friend she gave that name), we would have never known of Anna Frank nor her testimony of the agony persecuted minorities –Jews, in this case- went through during one of the darkest periods of human history, plagued with violence and bloodshedding.
An anonymous call to the GESTAPO (Nazi secret police) gave away the hideout and all of its inhabitants were captured and sent to concentration camps were they died. From this part of history on, there comes into play another chain of coincidences that made young Anna, who had died to tifus in a concentration camp few months before the end of the War, transcended to us: when the GESTAPO party stormed into the hideout house they did not pay attention to the diary nor the additional papers where she wrote: had they realizad what were them about, they would have surely destroyed them. The next remarkable fact was that those papers were collected by an old and loyal employee of Anna`s father, who only noted they were the girl`s writings and simply wanted to keep them to return them to Anna when she came back, what never happened, but, once again, did not understand their importance. Finally, Anna’s father managed to survive and, when he got the papers, decided to comply with her daughter’s wish: as she always wanted to be a writer, Otto Frank published all the material under the title that Anna said, in her diary, she wanted for a novel she never got to write: The House in the Back, though now that text is known all over the world as Anna Frank’s Diary.
In her own candid way, Anna spoke to all of us; to all of you, teenagers, to make us aware of the dark and sinister side concealed in our hearts and minds and against which the sole weapon is to pay more attention to knowledge and feel more care and interest for our fellow humand beings. In short, to put into practice what the scholar Bar-Hillel answered when asked what was the Talmud about: “Treat your fellow people as you wish to be treated yourself. All of the rest is nothing but comments”.
And what do you, reader, think of all this?, why don’t you tell us abour your feelings and ideas? Thank you!
Daniel Yagolkowski
Anna was a Jewish teenager who fled with her family from Nazi Germany to establish in Amsterdaam (Holland), country that also fell under Nazi occupation and, because of the persecution that totalitariaa régime did of Jews and other minorities it deemed to be inferior or dangerous, Anna, her family and another Jewish family went into hiding in a house located behind Anna’s father’s, Otto, factory, that he, who already knew what had happened to Jews in Germany, had secretly transformed into a hideout when Germany invaded Holland.During her stay in that house, Anna wrote all her feelings, worries and thoughts in a diary her parents had given her a long time before. There are people who say that this very action, the gift of a diary instead of any other thing a girl her age might have wanted, is a true display of how Coincidence may play a crucial role in history, because had it not been for the diary (she called it “Kitty”, because she wrote on it treating it as if it were a human friend she gave that name), we would have never known of Anna Frank nor her testimony of the agony persecuted minorities –Jews, in this case- went through during one of the darkest periods of human history, plagued with violence and bloodshedding.
An anonymous call to the GESTAPO (Nazi secret police) gave away the hideout and all of its inhabitants were captured and sent to concentration camps were they died. From this part of history on, there comes into play another chain of coincidences that made young Anna, who had died to tifus in a concentration camp few months before the end of the War, transcended to us: when the GESTAPO party stormed into the hideout house they did not pay attention to the diary nor the additional papers where she wrote: had they realizad what were them about, they would have surely destroyed them. The next remarkable fact was that those papers were collected by an old and loyal employee of Anna`s father, who only noted they were the girl`s writings and simply wanted to keep them to return them to Anna when she came back, what never happened, but, once again, did not understand their importance. Finally, Anna’s father managed to survive and, when he got the papers, decided to comply with her daughter’s wish: as she always wanted to be a writer, Otto Frank published all the material under the title that Anna said, in her diary, she wanted for a novel she never got to write: The House in the Back, though now that text is known all over the world as Anna Frank’s Diary.
In her own candid way, Anna spoke to all of us; to all of you, teenagers, to make us aware of the dark and sinister side concealed in our hearts and minds and against which the sole weapon is to pay more attention to knowledge and feel more care and interest for our fellow humand beings. In short, to put into practice what the scholar Bar-Hillel answered when asked what was the Talmud about: “Treat your fellow people as you wish to be treated yourself. All of the rest is nothing but comments”.
And what do you, reader, think of all this?, why don’t you tell us abour your feelings and ideas? Thank you!
Daniel Yagolkowski
