Dear Anne, I look at my country, my children, and wonder…
Be kind and have courage. ~ Anne Frank
Dear Anne,
You don’t know me. I’m a 57-year-old journalist from the future. A total stranger. Old enough to be your dad.
Seventy-five years have gone by. It’s now 2020, give or take a few months, from the day you died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp together with your sister. I’ve heard that you were one of 52,000 prisoners who perished there.
You were only 15.
If you survived the holocaust, by now you would have been 90 years old, wrinkly enough to be my grandmother.
I was a teenager when I first heard about you. I knew at once I had to get a copy of your diary. I still remember reading it like it was yesterday.
I was huddled on a couch, lost between the shadowy corridors of your cramped little hiding place in a building along Prinsengracht and the windows which open to Amsterdam’s clear blue skies.
You were born on June 12 which, by chance, is my country’s Independence Day. The first red-and-white checkered notebook was given you on that day as a gift for your birthday. This you named ‘Kitty’.
As a teenager, I too lived in very dangerous times. My country was under a dictatorship. While we didn’t have concentration camps, soldiers and police filled every corner of the city. The country was turned into one big ghetto, nearly in the same cone as Hitler’s ghettos isolated the Jews of your day.
My murdered countrymen turned up in rivers and dark shallow graves, gagged in packing tape and hogtied by barbed wires. Our women were raped. Students were abducted and simply disappeared.
Writers like you and me were jailed. Some killed.
We were robbed of money and dignity. For the next 14 years since martial law was declared on the evening of Sept. 21, 1972, there was very little we could do. Some resisted and were hunted down. Until the day we’ve had enough. Fourteen years were a long time to be patient, indifferent.
But the day came when we ousted the dictator.
Decades passed. Since then I’ve fathered three lovely children. Raised them on books, pizza, computer games — all from journalist’s wages. Movies, too, and the works of great poets and storytellers.
I never forgot the day I first read your diary. Your life has inspired me so much that I raised my eldest daughter Rei as a writer and diarist. She’s also a marvelous visual artist. She’s now about to become a mother.
Her younger brother is an animator. Growing up, they were no different from you who love to see the world through hope-colored eyes. I have no doubt you would’ve been good friends.
I’m writing you this letter, Anne, because today, I look at my country, my children, my upcoming grandchild, and wonder: what would become of them?
You see, the monsters and haters are back. The killings have started. Again we are in the middle of a systematic extermination. Like flowers in the hands of naughty boys we are being picked one by one and crushed underneath their feet. The last several months have been very quiet, more so after the pandemic arrived. But the killings continued.
Now every home has become a ghetto. We’re all isolated from one another. We’ve become prisoners in our own homes until the knock on the door arrives. The tokhang, they call it. Just as the knock on your door brought you to the hell that was Bergen-Belsen, by the time it arrives for us, it would also be too late.
I recall what you wrote in your diary on Nov. 19, 1942, Thursday. “It’s like the slave hunts of the olden days. I don’t mean to make light of this; it’s much too tragic for that. In the evenings when it’s dark, I often see long lines of good, innocent people, accompanied by crying children, walking on and on, ordered about by the handful of men who bully and beat them until they nearly drop. No one is spared. The sickly, the elderly, children, babies and pregnant women — all are marched to their death.”
In our case, mothers, fathers, children, even grandmothers, were either shot inside their homes or while crossing the street. No one knows what crimes they’ve committed or if they were guilty at all of any crime. From where I sit watching this, it’s as if they are being slaughtered for no reason at all.
No reason save for sport and for profit. Reports say assassins get paid per quota.
Time of day matters little. Murders happen in broad daylight. They stabbed a peace advocate numerous times. In his own home! We are being slaughtered in the name of a bogus drug and anti-terrorist war.
Even as I write this, my five-year-old daughter Likha sits on my lap, beaming with infinite possibilities. But will I ever get the chance to see those infinite possibilities? The way, probably, your own father Otto wondered about you and your sister? And that novel you’ve always wanted to write?
Where I come from, Anne, they kill journalists like me. Those in power care nothing for the truth. It is the strangest feeling to live in an era festering with lies and the reek of blood.
But then again we are left with little choice but to push back the jaws of tyranny and fear. I personally couldn’t help but fight back. I think of my loved ones and all I could do is stand between them and sure destruction. Am I afraid? Yes I am. But I would rather die than see this darkness lay a hand on my children.
I bare my heart every single day using words. Words which I hope would shed some light on this dark and lonely road to our freedom.
I cannot see myself living a life that is shackled. I may be old, but my heart remains as young as when I first learned the meaning of rebellion and freedom. I want to break the fetters that hold me back. Like you, words are my best chance of being heard.
Which is why every single day I choose to live out what you yourself felt on the night of April 11, 1944, Tuesday:
“That night I really thought I was going to die. I waited for the police and I was ready for death, like a soldier on the battlefield. I’d gladly have given my life for my country […] Young as I am, I face life with little more courage and have a better and truer sense of justice […] If only I can be myself, I’ll be satisfied. I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inner strength and a great deal of courage. If God lets me live… I’ll make my voice heard, I’ll go out into the world and work for mankind!”
I hear you, Anne. Your words have not fallen on deaf ears.
“I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness. I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty, too, will end, that peace and tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I will hold on to my ideals. Perhaps one day will come when I will realize them” (June 1944).
Don’t worry about Kitty, your diary. Your secrets, as well as your power, are safe within her pages — and the hearts of tens of millions more who have read them.
Thank you for the kindness of sharing your courage with all the rest of the world.
