Miep Gies dies at 100
There are few books that have had such a lasting impact as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
When the Gestapo raided the hiding place in the annex to Otto Frank’s business office on Aug. 4, 1944, and arrested its eight occupants, it left behind his daughter Anne’s diary and her writings on loose sheets of papers. The journals recounted life in those rooms behind a movable bookcase and the hopes of a girl on the brink of womanhood. Mrs. Gies gathered up those writings and hid them, unread, hoping that Anne would someday return to claim them.
But when Anne’s father, Otto Frank, returned to Amsterdam at the end of World War II, having been liberated from Auschwitz, he was the lone survivor of the family. Anne Frank had died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp three months before her 16th birthday. Her sister, Margot, died there at age 19 and their mother, Edith Frank, died at Auschwitz.
Mrs. Gies gave Anne’s writings to Mr. Frank, and they were first published in the Netherlands in 1947 in an abridged version. “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” has since been translated into dozens of languages in several editions, read by millions and adapted for the stage and screen, a voice representing the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.
Doubting and religious belief
This is a topic that interests me a great deal. There was a thread on Andrew Sullivan’s blog that I found intriguing. It was prompted by Pope Benedict’s recension of the prior excommunication of a schismatic bishop. (More posts on the current situation coming up.) Any reasonable person would call this bishop a holocaust denier. But that part is an aside. The substance of the post is about faith and doubt. Sullivan writes:
… the internal wrestling never ends. The search for truth must always be first; and religion is nothing if it is not true. Which is why doubt can never be a danger. Banishing doubt is the danger.