The Diary of Anne Frank

75 years ago today, in 1942, Anne Frank received a blank book for her 13th birthday, and soon started writing her diary in it.

From a 2014 article about Anne Frank's living relatives (which I've previously blogged):

Eva Schloss, a playmate of Anne Frank’s in Amsterdam whose mother later married Anne’s father, recalls an 11-year-old who hopscotched, shot marbles, gossiped and talked so much her friends nicknamed her “Miss Quack Quack.”

Anne also had an intense interest in clothing, boys and Hollywood stars like Deanna Durbin.

“When I told her I had an older brother, she said: ‘Oooh. I must come to your apartment and meet him.’ ”

Anne was a lively girl who could be something of “a busybody,” Monica Smith said about her young second cousin — and she often had ink stains on her slender fingers. . . .

The memories, unremarkable as they may seem, are about a girl whose diary and death from typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at 15 have made her perhaps the Holocaust’s foremost symbol of slaughtered innocence. People are fascinated or moved by the slimmest morsel of information about her. When watershed Holocaust dates come up on the calendar, like the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the pogrom in Germany and Austria on Nov. 9 and 10 in 1938, Anne’s surviving relatives and friends are invited to share tidbits as well as tell their own often harrowing stories. . . .

Mrs. Smith’s parents put her on the Kindertransport to Holland that rescued 2,000 German-Jewish children, though one-third did not survive the Nazi occupation. Mrs. Smith, who was about 15, spent weeks quarantined in a barracks sleeping on a mattress on the floor, was taken to a more rural camp, and then to the Burgerweeshuis, an orphanage housing 75 refugee children.

Anne and her father, by then living in Amsterdam, visited the orphanage a dozen times, sometimes bringing treats. Mrs. Smith also saw Anne’s older sister, Margot, who was “totally different” — quiet and demure. Mrs. Smith remembers staying in the Franks’ modern apartment block on the Merwedeplein square and visiting Otto Frank’s spice-company offices on Prinsengracht — where he was to arrange for “the secret annex” that his family hid in for two years. And she remembers how engaged Anne and her father were with each other.

“The two of them were very close,” she said. . . .

Eva Schloss, 85, is an elegant, articulate woman who worked as a photographer, ran an antiques shop, raised three daughters and wrote a 1988 book, “Eva’s Story: A Survivor’s Tale by the Stepsister of Anne Frank.” She was born Eva Geiringer in Vienna on May 11, 1929, a month before Anne. Hers was an assimilated family that owned a shoe factory. In school, children were separated for religious classes.

“Everybody knew who was a Jew,” she said. “So after the Nazis came, we were immediately attacked and beaten up and the teachers were watching it and not doing anything.”

Her family ended up in Amsterdam, also living in the Merwedeplein apartments across from the Franks. The two girls were in a loose gang that played together in the square. Anne, she said, had a leader’s personality; she was a “big know-it-all,” occasionally “domineering,” who demanded attention.

When the Nazis occupied Holland in May 1940, Jews were forbidden, among other things, to go to movies.

“They showed the Disney film ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ and the Christian children talked about it,” Mrs. Schloss recalled. “For us it was already a tragedy.”

In July 1942, when the Nazis began calling up Jews like Margot and Eva’s brother, Heinz, for work assignments in Germany, the Frank and Geiringer families went into hiding, with the Geiringers splitting up among a succession of Dutch resistance families. In May 1944, Mrs. Schloss’s family was betrayed and wound up in Auschwitz. Only she and her mother survived.

Otto Frank, knowing his wife had died, was also liberated at Auschwitz and returned to Amsterdam to await news about his daughters. Mrs. Schloss’s mother and Otto became friends and eventually lovers.

“He looked like a ghost,” she said. “One day he came to us with a little parcel. It was a diary.

“It took him three weeks to read it,” she remembered, and “he said, ‘I didn’t really know my own child.’ ”

Why talk about "Islamic terrorists"?

Chris Matthews asks:

Why does [Marco] Rubio want to have this as a clash of civilizations? I though that was what ISIS wanted, what al Qaeda wants, to have the Islamic world fight with the Western world! Why would he want what they want — to see the world in a religious struggle? Why say "Islamic"? Why don’t we say "terrorist"?

I'd resist any suggestion that we should speak only in vague terms about terrorism/terrorists and constantly avoid mentioning the ideological underpinnings of those who have built an international network that threatens civilization as we know it. There are many other terrorists around the world with a variety of agendas, but we rightly don't put as high a priority on stopping them because they lack the global ambitions of groups like ISIL and al Qaeda.

It isn't convincing to suggest that the terrorists aren't really Islamic because they're evil, and Islam itself isn't evil. Using the adjective "Islamic" to apply to terrorists is not saying that all (or even most) Muslims are (or even support) evil. If you believe that, then to be consistent, you should object to describing the Crusades as Christian, or the Holocaust as German, etc. Well I'm sorry, but you're just not going to get anywhere by trying to erase the parts of history that make you feel uncomfortable. Someone else, who's in the habit of speaking or writing more bluntly, will always be able to come along and point out the truth in a more compelling manner than you have. If you believe in your message about terrorism — whatever that message is — you should want to communicate it in clear language that describes reality with precision. Instead of objecting to those who use such language when it's disturbing, we should be fighting against those who have made the use of such disturbing language necessary.

"You don't know my name, do you?"

A translator's struggle to export Seinfeld to Germany.

The hardest joke to translate, out of 180 episodes, was the one where Jerry doesn't know the name of the woman he's dating, but only knows it "rhymes with a female body part."

Nazi jokes were also dicey:

Seinfeld’s Jewish references posed a unique challenge: as Sebastian explained, "The Germans have a certain you-know-what with the Jewish." Her editor was worried about some of Seinfeld’s Jewish jokes. "We better not say it like that," she remembered her editor saying, "because the Germans may be offended." She added later, recalling the incident to me, "They should be offended, in my understanding. They did it!"

Sebastian appreciated Seinfeld’s direct approach to Jewish history. She wanted to use jokes in direct translation, but the editor wouldn’t let her. She lost several battles. It was a fine line: Der Suppen-Nazi? Sure. . . . An entire episode based on George being mistaken for a neo-Nazi was problematic. So were references to the TV miniseries Holocaust and the film Schindler’s List. Take Elaine’s voiceover narration in "The Subway" episode when her train gets stuck: "We are in a cage. . . . Oh, I can't breathe, I feel faint. Take it easy, it'll start moving soon. Think about the people in the concentration camps, what they went through."

Occasionally, Sebastian triumphed in her conflicts with editors — the practicalities of the show demanded an authentic translation. In an early episode, one of Jerry’s comedy routines addresses the fact that Nazis in World War II movies had "like two separate ‘heils.' They had like the regular ‘heil,’ and then when they were around the offices, they had like this casual ‘heil.’" There was no way to avoid a faithful translation . . .

Worst. Punditry. Ever.

The New York Times, December 20, 1924 — 90 years ago today:

(via)

Kristallnacht

It's the 76th anniversary of the beginning of Kristallnacht ("the night of broken glass"), in which a thousand synagogues and thousands of Jewish businesses were attacked, in what's considered to mark the beginning of the Holocaust. The New York Times reports:

When watershed Holocaust dates come up on the calendar, like the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the pogrom in Germany and Austria on Nov. 9 and 10 in 1938, Anne [Frank]’s surviving relatives and friends are invited to share tidbits as well as tell their own often harrowing stories. . . .

Eva Schloss, 85, is an elegant, articulate woman who worked as a photographer, ran an antiques shop, raised three daughters and wrote a 1988 book, “Eva’s Story: A Survivor’s Tale by the Stepsister of Anne Frank.” She was born Eva Geiringer in Vienna on May 11, 1929, a month before Anne. Hers was an assimilated family that owned a shoe factory. In school, children were separated for religious classes.

“Everybody knew who was a Jew,” she said. “So after the Nazis came, we were immediately attacked and beaten up and the teachers were watching it and not doing anything.”

Her family ended up in Amsterdam, also living in the Merwedeplein apartments across from the Franks. The two girls were in a loose gang that played together in the square. Anne, she said, had a leader’s personality; she was a “big know-it-all,” occasionally “domineering,” who demanded attention.

When the Nazis occupied Holland in May 1940, Jews were forbidden, among other things, to go to movies. “They showed the Disney film ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ and the Christian children talked about it,” Mrs. Schloss recalled. “For us it was already a tragedy.”

In July 1942, when the Nazis began calling up Jews like Margot and Eva’s brother, Heinz, for work assignments in Germany, the Frank and Geiringer families went into hiding, with the Geiringers splitting up among a succession of Dutch resistance families. In May 1944, Mrs. Schloss’s family was betrayed and wound up in Auschwitz. Only she and her mother survived.

Otto Frank, knowing his wife had died, was also liberated at Auschwitz and returned to Amsterdam to await news about his daughters. Mrs. Schloss’s mother and Otto became friends and eventually lovers.

“He looked like a ghost,” she said. “One day he came to us with a little parcel. It was a diary. It took him three weeks to read it, . . . and he said, ‘I didn’t really know my own child.'”

The Holocaust was even worse than we thought

The New York Times explains:

[R]esearchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington. ...

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear.

The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions. ...

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.

The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.

In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.

Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

Jewish stores attacked in New Jersey

The attackers seem to be copying Kristallnacht.

Happy 107th birthday to Alice Herz-Sommer, who survived the Holocaust with music

Here's her Wikipedia entry, which links to this article:

I played Chopin as they sent my family to their deaths

That article explains:

In 1943, with her husband and their six-year-old son, she was deported from Prague to the Nazis' "model" concentration camp at Terezin ....

Her mother had already been deported and killed by Nazis a year earlier. The article goes on:

In Terezin, despite appalling conditions, she was determined to live for her son and for her music. In the camp, music became part of daily life. She gave more than 100 concerts there. Many of her fellow inmates were artists, musicians and writers, but there was nothing remotely philanthropic about the Nazis' encouragement of the arts in Terezin. "It was propaganda," she says contemptuously. "This was something they could show the world, while in reality they were killing us."

Her husband was taken away to Auschwitz and later Dachau, where he died of typhus six weeks before the end of the war. His parting words to her were: "Do nothing voluntarily." She believes this saved her life and their son Raphael; other women, offered the chance to follow their husbands, were sent to their deaths.

In this documentary, you can see her talking and playing piano recently, at age 106:



"My world is music. I am not interested in anything else. ... Beethoven, he is a miracle. His music is not only melody, but what is inside. ... Music is the only thing that helps me to have hope. It's a sort of religion, actually. Music is God. In difficult times you feel it especially — when you are suffering."

"A lot of German journalists come and want to ... speak with me and so on. Before they enter my room, they ask, 'Are we allowed to enter your room? Do you not hate us?' So my answer is, 'I never hated. I would never hate. Hatred brings only hatred.'"

Revelations about self-hating politicians

That seems to be a theme this week:

1. The big news today (though it's old news to many people) is that Ken Mehlman -- former Bush advisor and Republican National Committee chairman -- has come out as gay. The author of that piece, Marc Ambinder, notes: "Mehlman is the most powerful Republican in history to identify as gay." Soon he's going to participate in a fundraiser for the organization that hired the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging California's Proposition 8 (i.e., the pro same-sex marriage side).

Bill Maher outed him on TV back in 2006 in an interview with Larry King. (That part of the interview was later excised, but it lives on thanks to YouTube.) I generally don't approve of this kind of outing -- I think it's counterproductive and hypocritical. But I also find it hard not to take some glee in the spectacle.

Maher added a devastating insight:

It's so ironic: Republicans, the anti-abortion party, always trying to kill something inside of themselves.

2. Of course, this is the ultimate self-hating politician.

The "taste" of political and economic ideas

I love this passage, from an old book review in The New Republic, about which I'm deliberately omitting the key details:

It will not do to dismiss [this book] as a farrago of nonsense. Its very quality of not making sense is exactly what gives it effectiveness. We must rid ourselves of the view that only logical ideas can be political weapons. Ideas in politics are much like poetry: they need no inner logical structure to be effective. Edward Lear's nonsense verse merely extends a principle inherent in poetry as a whole. And _____ is, in a sense, the Edward Lear of political thinking. He has taught us that, just as a limerick drives Shakespeare out of our minds, . . . illogical political ideas drive out the logical. And whether or not he makes sense, his book has become the profoundly evocative philosophy of millions of people.

I left out the specific book and author in question because I think the point is worth considering in the abstract before being distracted by the specifics. If you click the link, you'll immediately see who it's about.

Will Wilkinson and Tyler Cowen have a similar insight in this portion of a Bloggingheads diavlog. (I want to be clear that I'm not at all trying to put down their thoughts by connecting them with the above passage.)



A transcript:

Wilkinson: My own view of intellectual life was influenced by it.* When I consider questions about difficult intellectual issues, I think of them as somehow having to do with taste . . . . There are certain arguments that 'taste' wrong. Because you don't necessarily explicitly see the logical structure of an argument. But you're like, "There's something wrong with this." And a lot of what you do when you're trained in a discipline, whether it's philosophy or economics, is that you're cultivating a kind of epistemic taste. You're not implementing an algorithm to tell whether a certain policy argument violates a fundamental principle of economics. You have to develop what people call economic intuition. But what is that? And it feels like what you have when you can taste the elements in a good Merlot. "Oh, there's a little bit of blackberry in there."

Cowen: Economics and politics are much more about taste and aesthetics, I think, than often we have realized. And there are thinkers that see that, when you go back in the history of ideas. They're not always the most salubrious thinkers, but there's a lot to it.

* This segment explains what Wilkinson means at the beginning of the clip when he says his view of intellectual life was "influenced by it" -- the "it" is Hume's essay "Of the Standard of Taste" (which I've blogged before).

By the way, that whole diavlog is excellent and worth listening to. (You might want to download it as a podcast.) It's structured as an interview with Cowen about his book Create Your Own Economy (which is oddly titled since it's not mainly about business or economics). But the diavlog transcends the promotional interview format and turns out to be an enlightening conversation about the value of outside-the-mainstream thinking styles.

Anti-vegetarian argument #2: Tradition

In a discussion about vegetarians and Thanksgiving, an AskMetafilter commenter said this:

Food isn't just fuel - it's a whole lot of what symbolizes who you are and where you come from. One of the problems with giving up meat, especially if it's not by your own choice, is that you're giving up pieces of culture, heritage, family traditions, ties to your childhood memories, ties to the way your great grandma cooked for her children...

For some reason that's an aspect of vegetarianism that isn't often addressed.

More recently, in a personal essay in the current New York Times magazine, Jonathan Safran Foer says:

When I was young, I would often spend the weekend at my grandmother’s house. ... We thought she was the greatest chef who ever lived. My brothers and I would tell her as much several times a meal. And yet we were worldly enough kids to know that the greatest chef who ever lived would probably have more than one recipe (chicken with carrots), and that most great recipes involved more than two ingredients. ...

In fact, her chicken with carrots probably was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. But that had little to do with how it was prepared, or even how it tasted. Her food was delicious because we believed it was delicious. We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God. ...

My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. ... [M]y choice on their behalf means they will never eat their great-grandmother’s singular dish. They will never receive that unique and most direct expression of her love, will perhaps never think of her as the greatest chef who ever lived. Her primal story, our family’s primal story, will have to change.

That sounds like Foer basically agrees with the AskMetafilter commenter. But he has a second thought:

Or will it? It wasn’t until I became a parent that I understood my grandmother’s cooking. The greatest chef who ever lived wasn’t preparing food, but humans. ... [S]he would tell me about her escape from Europe [in World War II], the foods she had to eat and those she wouldn't. It was the story of her life -- "Listen to me," she would plead -- and I knew a vital lesson was being transmitted, even if I didn’t know, as a child, what that lesson was. I know, now, what it was.

Foer explains the lesson at the end of the essay.

It's actually not the kind of essay that most appeals to me. I prefer to read writing that gets straight to the point instead of taking extra time to build up characters who gradually embody that point.

I also find it unfortunate that Foer puts down the role of "reason" in decision-making, saying that "stories" are more important. Of course, this is a self-serving view for a professional storyteller. But he himself relies on reason when he says:

A vegetarian diet can be rich and fully enjoyable, but I couldn’t honestly argue, as many vegetarians try to, that it is as rich as a diet that includes meat. (Those who eat chimpanzee look at the Western diet as sadly deficient of a great pleasure.) I love calamari, I love roasted chicken, I love a good steak. But I don’t love them without limit.

This isn't animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

But none of that gets to the heart of the "tradition" argument. I would argue that tradition simply isn't as important as numerous other factors -- but that's not likely to be satisfying to those who raise the tradition concern in the first place.

Perhaps it is better to use "stories" rather than "reason" to respond to that concern. That's what Foer does in this essay -- to chilling effect in the final section.

Should we read a mass murderer's blog?

After that guy opened fire in a parking lot the other day, killing three people and himself, someone posted his blog to Metafilter with this teaser:

A murderer attempts to explain, justify, and understand his crime (before the fact).

Now, that link to his blog doesn't work anymore. The full content of the site has been preserved at other URLs, but I'm not going to link to them since his blog encourages harassing specific private citizens at their addresses and phone numbers. (If you're really curious, you can look for them in the comments of the Metafilter post.)

Many commenters on Metafilter reacted very negatively to the decision to link to his blog, but most of them weren't objecting to the addresses and phone numbers. Many comments were along these lines:

I say delete this, so his "my voice will speak forever" crap is denied.

That's a reference to a message that the killer, George Sodini, posted at the bottom of his site:

This should not be taken off the web. It is obviously my view and opinion. Reproduce this as you wish, in its entirity. Copy this to usenet/newsgroups where my voice will speak forever!

And no less than the New York Times gave him what he wanted by immortalizing his words in an article with the headline, "Blog Details Shooter’s Frustration":

Mr. Sodini, 48, described his anger and frustration in painstaking detail ... in a chilling online diary, offering an extraordinarily stark portrait of a killer’s motives. ...

In his online journal, ... Mr. Sodini, a programmer-analyst at a local law firm, said that he had not had a girlfriend since 1984 and that he had not had sex since July 1990, when he was 29.

“I actually look good,” Mr. Sodini wrote in an entry dated Dec. 29, 2008. “I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me — over an 18- or 25-year period. That is how I see it. Thirty million is my rough guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are.

“A man needs a woman for confidence. He gets a boost on the job, career, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows inside he has someone to spend the night with and who is also a friend.”

Here's what I said to those who said we shouldn't be reading his words:

Isn't it worthwhile to try to understand the thoughts of someone who's going to commit murder? Similarly, I think it's worth reading bin Laden's writings to try to understand the terrorist mindset. The idea that Sodini's website should be ignored sounds a lot like those who balk at the idea of "understanding" terrorists. You can understand what went on in someone's mind without excusing their actions.

The fact that the site implores the public to harass random citizens is way over the line. I wouldn't mind seeing this deleted for that reason. But on the whole, I think his blog is pretty interesting, in the same way I find bin Laden's fatwas and Hitler's Mein Kampf interesting and important reading.

If you had read Mein Kampf when it originally came out, you might have been able to predict that the Holocaust would happen. Hitler describes huge natural disasters as positive things that could wipe out the weak elements of humanity, leaving a few strong people to start a super-race. We can't stop the Holocaust now, of course. But does that mean there's no reason to read Mein Kampf? No, it's still inherently worthwhile to try to understand the mind of someone capable of doing such great evil.

Similarly, some of the Metafilter commenters pointed out that reading Sodini's blog isn't going to help anyone stop this from "happening again." Even assuming that's true (though I don't know how they know that), the site can be worth reading without clearing the threshold of "This could save lives!" I actually find some of Sodini's comments (about how men need women) to be poignant and a little insightful. Of course, this is absolutely no excuse for killing random innocent people.

But some people will say this is missing the point: the problem is that if we pay any attention to the details of what Sodini said or what was going on in his life, we're "glorifying" a killer. Well, no, there's nothing glorious about it. His writings make him sound absolutely pathetic and insignificant. It's hard to imagine copycat murders inspired by the guy who claimed that he opened fire out of frustration that he couldn't find a girlfriend. It's easier to imagine the reverse: that a self-aggrandizing potential mass murderer out there would feel deflated to find out how utterly lacking in glory this guy is.