Anne Frank, left. At right, Rouwaida Hanoun, a Syrian 5-year-old who was wounded during an airstrike on Aleppo last week. Credit Left, Anne Frank Fonds — Basel, via Getty Images
Source: NY Times
A Column by Nicholas Kristof
AMSTERDAM — On April 30, 1941, a Jewish man here in Amsterdam wrote a desperate letter to an American friend, pleading for help emigrating to the United States.
“U.S.A. is the only country we could go to,” he wrote. “It is for the sake of the children mainly.”
A volunteer found that plea for help in 2005 when she was sorting old World War II refugee files in New York City. It looked like countless other files, until she saw the children’s names.
“Oh my God,” she said, “this is the Anne Frank file.” Along with the letter were many others by Otto Frank, frantically seeking help to flee Nazi persecution and obtain a visa to America, Britain or Cuba — but getting nowhere because of global indifference to Jewish refugees.
We all know that the Frank children were murdered by the Nazis, but what is less known is the way Anne’s fate was sealed by a callous fear of refugees, among the world’s most desperate people.
Sound familiar?
President Obama vowed to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees — a tiny number, just one-fifth of 1 percent of the total — and Hillary Clinton suggested taking more. Donald Trump has repeatedly excoriated them for a willingness to welcome Syrians and has called for barring Muslims. Fears of terrorism have left Muslim refugees toxic in the West, and almost no one wants them any more than anyone wanted a German-Dutch teenager named Anne.
“No one takes their family into hiding in the heart of an occupied city unless they are out of options,” notes Mattie J. Bekink, a consultant at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. “No one takes their child on a flimsy boat to cross the Mediterranean unless they are desperate.”
The son of a World War II refugee myself, I’ve been researching the anti-refugee hysteria of the 1930s and ’40s. As Bekink suggests, the parallels to today are striking.
For the Frank family, a new life in America seemed feasible. Anne had studied English shorthand, and her father spoke English, had lived on West 71st Street in Manhattan, and had been a longtime friend of Nathan Straus Jr., an official in the Franklin Roosevelt administration.
Categories: Humanitarian crisis, Syria, The Muslim Times
To: NY Times: This is a typical Jewish underhand way of using decent people to cover their tracks. Comparing people to the jews, this is in fact the jews whimpering reminders to us about the way the jews are treated. Tip: In future, look first at what the jews are doing in Palestine.
You cannot change history. The treatment of the Jews in Germany was a despicable act that one
must not forget. One must learn from history and prevent such injustices from happening again.
Tara Ahmad:- what happened to the jews in Germany was brought on themselves by themselves, that is the SIXTH time they were caught, recorded in the Bible and continuing historical records. You said “One must learn from history and prevent such injustices from happening again”, I said “In future, look first at what the jews are doing in Palestine”, have you looked in Palestine?
The Jews didn’t bring this on themselves. They didn’t ask for millions and millions to be murder.
Not only Jews died in the Holocaust.