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.

Iran puts you in prison for a political cartoon, then keeps you there longer after a handshake

"Amnesty International reports that Atena Farghadani, 29, who was jailed after she depicted Iranian government officials as monkeys and goats in a satirical cartoon, may face a longer sentence amid claims over the handshake.

Charges of an “illegitimate sexual relationship short of adultery” have been brought against Farghadani and her lawyer Mohammad Moghimi amid allegations he visited her in jail and shook her hand - which is illegal in Iran."

(via)





(Uncredited photo from the link.)

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.'”

Frederick Douglass on the 4th of July

"At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. ... The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival. ...

Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other. ... No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen in contrast with nature."

— Frederick Douglass (1852)

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.”

"No One Murdered Because Of This Image"

Jonah Goldberg analyzes the profound significance of an Onion article.

Teacher fired for getting pregnant without being married

She was engaged, but that wasn't good enough for the private Christian school. She even offered to get married in order to keep her job, but the school explained that this was irrelevant to their decision. The school's objection isn't to raising a child outside of a marriage, but to the very act of getting pregnant.

Christopher Hitchens on North Korea

"The life of the human being . . . is completely pointless. The concept of liberty or humor or irony or happiness or love doesn't exist. You are there simply as a prop for the state. And though it used to be, as with any slave system, that they would feed you in return for your services, that compact broke down a couple decades ago. Now they don't feed you either."

Kim Jong Il is dead.

The murderous dictator of North Korea has died at 69 or 70.

A comment in my Facebook feed says this almost makes up for the loss of Christopher Hitchens and Vaclav Havel.

I'm afraid that of the three of them, Kim Jong Il will be the easiest to replace.

Jewish stores attacked in New Jersey

The attackers seem to be copying Kristallnacht.

Christopher Hitchens and Thomas Sowell on "simple" theories of terrorism and crime

Christopher Hitchens writes, in an article headlined "Simply Evil":

The proper task of the "public intellectual" might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either. To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and "unbelievers," and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.

To me, this remains the main point about al-Qaida and its surrogates. I do not believe, by stipulating it as the main point, that I try to oversimplify matters. I feel no need to show off or to think of something novel to say. Moreover, many of the attempts to introduce "complexity" into the picture strike me as half-baked obfuscations or distractions. These range from the irredeemably paranoid and contemptible efforts to pin responsibility for the attacks onto the Bush administration or the Jews, to the sometimes wearisome but not necessarily untrue insistence that Islamic peoples have suffered oppression. (Even when formally true, the latter must simply not be used as nonsequitur special pleading for the use of random violence by self-appointed Muslims.)

Underlying these and other attempts to change the subject there was, and still is, a perverse desire to say that the 9/11 atrocities were in some way deserved, or made historically more explicable, by the many crimes of past American foreign policy. Either that, or—to recall the contemporary comments of the "Reverends" Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson—a punishment from heaven for American sinfulness. . . . That this was an assault upon our society, whatever its ostensible capitalist and militarist "targets," was again thought too obvious a point for a clever person to make. It became increasingly obvious, though, with every successive nihilistic attack on London, Madrid, Istanbul, Baghdad, and Bali. . . .

10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.

This reminds me of a great passage — one of many — in Thomas Sowell's 2009 book Intellectuals and Society. (By the way, I appreciate that this book has an index that's more complex than the usual list of obvious nouns like names and places. This index actually has an entry for "Simplistic Arguments," which allowed me to easily find the passage I was thinking of.) Sowell writes:

[T]he assumption that certain arguments are unworthy because they are "simplistic" — not as a conclusion from counter-evidence or counter-arguments, but in lieu of counter-evidence or counter-arguments . . . is a very effective debating tactic, however questionable it may be logically. With one word, it preempts the intellectual high ground without offering anything substantive. It is insinuated, rather than demonstrated, that a more complex explanation is more logically consistent or more empirically valid.

That one argument may be simpler than another says nothing about which argument reaches conclusions that turn out to be validated by empirical evidence more often. Certainly the explanation of many physical phenomena — the sun setting over the horizon, for example — by the argument that the earth is round is simpler than the more complex explanations of the same phenomena by members of the Flat Earth Society. Evasions of the obvious can become very complex. (81)

Later in the book, he applies this observation to fighting crime:

Even the most blatant facts can be sidestepped by saying that the causes of crime are too "complex" to be covered by a "simplistic" explanation. This verbal tactic simply expands the question to unanswerable dimensions, as a prelude to dismissing any explanation not consonant with the prevailing vision as "simplistic" because it cannot fully answer the expanded question. But no one has to master the complexities of Newton's law of gravity to know that stepping off the roof of a skyscraper will have consequences. Similarly, no one has to unravel the complexities of the innumerable known and unknown reasons why people commit crimes to know that putting criminals behind bars has a better track record of reducing the crime rate than any of the complex theories or lofty policies favored by the intelligentsia. (195)

Nicholas Kristof reports from a hospital in Bahrain

On his Facebook page:

At the main hospital in Bahrain, I interviewed doctors who said they treated about 600 injured. I saw 3 dead in morgue with gunshot wounds. Interviewed ambulance drivers/paramedics who said they were beaten for trying to treat the injured. Hospital says government has barred ambulances from going out on calls. The hospital scene breaks my heart.

UPDATE: Just 2 days later, the New York Times reports:

Thousands of jubilant protesters surged back into the symbolic heart of Bahrain [Pearl Square in Manama] on Saturday after the government withdrew its security forces, calling for calm after days of violent crackdowns. . . .

The shift . . . was at least a temporary victory for the Shiite protesters, who had rejected a call to negotiate from Bahrain’s Sunni monarch until the authorities pulled the military off the streets.

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.'"

"What will future generations condemn us for?"

That's the excellent question asked and answered by a piece in today's Washington Post by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

In my post on the death of Senator Robert Byrd, I quoted this Metafilter comment that tried to draw a lesson from Byrd's membership in, and subsequent renunciation of, the Ku Klux Klan:

I imagine that you (and the rest of us), should we have the opportunity to examine our actions today in 70 years, would be taken aback at some of the things we did and believed, things that appeared to us at the time to be obviously, manifestly right. And here's the kicker: we don't know what those things will be.

We may not want to admit it, but on some issue we are all Robert Byrd. Let's just hope we have the grace, as did Byrd, to realize what that issue is when the time comes.

That comment is phrased as if it's a foregone conclusion that it's going to be a long, long time before we can even perceive what these issues are.

Well, Appiah's article gives some basis to be a little more optimistic. Specifically, he gives "three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation":

First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.

Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, "We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?")

And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they're complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn't think about what made those goods possible. That's why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.

Appiah gives 4 current practices that he imagines that we'll look at in the future and ask: "What were people thinking?"

Can you guess what Appiah thinks these practices are? Remember, the Metafilter commenter didn't just say it'll be a long time before we succeed in putting an end to the practices, but that it would be a long time before we were even capable of reasoning our way to a conclusion about what the practices are. If you can come up with even one of the same answers as Appiah before clicking the link in the next paragraph, that would suggest that the Metafilter commenter was too pessimistic; we actually can answer these questions today.

After you've thought about it, read Appiah's answers.

ADDED: Feel free to put your own answer in the comments, either before or after reading the article.

Mexico's drug violence and journalistic self-censorship

A typically appalling account of Mexico's drug wars by the New York Times quotes a chilling front-page editorial in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, which has been so ravaged by the violence that there's been an exodus from the city. It's a common gimmick for an editorial to pretend to address someone ("An Open Letter to ____"), but this is the first time I've seen one that literally addresses a group of people — the drug lords — as a genuine form of communication:

“We want you to explain to us what you want from us . . . . What are we supposed to publish or not publish, so we know what to abide by. You are at this time the de facto authorities in this city because the legal authorities have not been able to stop our colleagues from falling.”

I noticed the article because one of my friends recommended it on Facebook, which showed up in my feed as: "[Friend's Name] likes 'Mexico Paper, a Drug War Victim, Calls for a Voice.'" My friend remarked on the vacuous cheeriness with which Facebook's jargon has pervaded our content sharing:

When you "recommend" a NYTimes article, Facebook treats it as a "like." "Like" is not the right term for my regard for this article.

Moral crimes

"Sixteen-year-old Sabera, with a pretty yellow head scarf, frets that she is missing school. 'I was about to get engaged, and the boy came to ask me himself, before sending his parents. A lady in our neighbourhood saw us, and called the police,' she explains. She was sentenced to three years but, in an act of mercy, it was shortened to 18 months . . ."

The BBC reports from an Afghan women's prison.

According to Afghanistan's Ministry for Women's Affairs, "about half of Afghanistan's 476 women prisoners were detained for 'moral crimes'" -- a broad category that includes "running away from home" (often fleeing domestic violence), "refusing to marry," and "marrying against their family's wishes."

Reporting on a different Afghan prison in 2008, The Independent noted that most of the women there were in prison for being raped.

More: Al Jazeera video from 2007.

(Cross-posted on Metafilter. First link via my mom, Ann Althouse.)

"Un-wars"

"Across much of Africa."

Warning: very disturbing text.

My dad reports from a Rwandan genocide site, "including as few details as I can."

"The memorial rooms stink of death, still."

Clicking on the photograph of "a mother holding her child" goes to the full-size version. Sitting here in the comfort of our rooms, it's impossible to appreciate the full horror contained in that photo.

Beth Rickey (1953 - 2009)

The Washington Times has this wonderful obituary, which chronicles the little-known Beth Rickey's efforts to expose the full extent of David Duke's racism. Excerpt:

Beth Rickey, perhaps more than any single person, helped stop the meteoric political rise of neo-Nazi David Duke. People today may forget what a political force Duke had become in Louisiana back then. With three weeks remaining in the 1991 race for governor, Duke had been in a statistical dead heat in the polls against ethically challenged former three-term governor Edwin Edwards. And Duke had the momentum.

What Duke could never escape, though, was all the evidence that he truly was a neo-Nazi, rather than what he claimed to be: a next-generation Reaganite conservative with a long-ago tawdry Ku Klux Klan past that he had thoroughly put behind him. Much of that evidence was unearthed by Beth Rickey.

The whole article is worth reading for its dramatic details about how she accomplished this.

The Washington Times (a conservative site) reports that Rickey died earlier this month of a mysterious illness because she had run out of money for health care. A social worker had actually found a philanthropist who was willing to help her, but he couldn't reach her in time to save her life.