{"id":3727,"date":"2011-01-16T10:23:57","date_gmt":"2011-01-16T18:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=3727"},"modified":"2011-01-16T10:24:44","modified_gmt":"2011-01-16T18:24:44","slug":"the-anne-frank-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2011\/01\/16\/the-anne-frank-house\/","title":{"rendered":"The Anne Frank House"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We went to the Anne Frank house.\u00c2\u00a0 I was there once before, back in &#8217;72 as Bob Seger would say, but it was different.\u00c2\u00a0 They had flat screens and quotes and&#8230;the diary itself.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t remember that.<\/p>\n<p>It almost didn&#8217;t seem real.\u00c2\u00a0 The house, that is.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s half a century later.\u00c2\u00a0 I was calculating.\u00c2\u00a0 In &#8217;72, it was 27 years since the war, now it&#8217;s 39 years beyond that.\u00c2\u00a0 A long time, in a lifetime.\u00c2\u00a0 Do we start to forget?<\/p>\n<p>Do we believe that Jews are assimilated?\u00c2\u00a0 That we all get along?\u00c2\u00a0 That right wing extremism cannot happen again?<\/p>\n<p>Not on your life.<\/p>\n<p>Judaism is something you just can&#8217;t exorcise.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s there in your name.\u00c2\u00a0 The Nazis didn&#8217;t want to hear that you&#8217;d lapsed, that you were now going to church, they saw beyond that bullshit, you were sent to the camps, you had to die, for being different.\u00c2\u00a0 You need someone to blame your problems on.<\/p>\n<p>Just like disadvantaged Americans pin their problems on immigrants.\u00c2\u00a0 Because to look to yourself is to accept blame.\u00c2\u00a0 And that just cannot be done.<\/p>\n<p>Everybody hates the Jews.\u00c2\u00a0 If you don&#8217;t know this, you&#8217;re not one.\u00c2\u00a0 My father used to tell me about anti-Semitism, and I&#8217;d pooh-pooh his tales, saying we were living in different times.\u00c2\u00a0 But that&#8217;s wrong, it&#8217;s right beneath the surface.\u00c2\u00a0 We&#8217;re different.\u00c2\u00a0 We&#8217;ve got hooked noses.\u00c2\u00a0 We&#8217;ve got horns.\u00c2\u00a0 We&#8217;ve got all the money.\u00c2\u00a0 We&#8217;re the problem.\u00c2\u00a0 We&#8217;ve got to go.<\/p>\n<p>Never again.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s why they say we must study the Holocaust, so it can&#8217;t be repeated.\u00c2\u00a0 And for a long time I thought those days were through, now I know they&#8217;re not.\u00c2\u00a0 Because ethnic cleansing goes on in Eastern Europe and Africa and in America political parties say those on the other side must die.<\/p>\n<p>Lock and load baby.\u00c2\u00a0 We need the guns so we can fight the government.\u00c2\u00a0 Huh?\u00c2\u00a0 Where&#8217;s civilization?<\/p>\n<p>Being at the Anne Frank house made me think not only about how we took all our diversions for granted, even sunlight and play, but how we dedicated so much time to entertainment and sports, believing they&#8217;re a religion when our true religion could be responsible for our deaths. What&#8217;s important here?<\/p>\n<p>Eight people lived in darkness for years, only to ultimately perish.\u00c2\u00a0 Otto Frank survived, but his family did not.\u00c2\u00a0 He took ads in papers trying to find them.\u00c2\u00a0 My mother&#8217;s Russian uncle did this, that&#8217;s how he found his relatives in the United States, through the Jewish paper, but Otto just ended up with confirmation of his family&#8217;s decimation.<\/p>\n<p>There was this other video, of Anne&#8217;s childhood friend.\u00c2\u00a0 Who saw her in the concentration camp.\u00c2\u00a0 She said Anne had given up all hope.\u00c2\u00a0 They tell us to keep on trying, to keep our chin up, but that doesn&#8217;t always work.<\/p>\n<p>Anne wanted to be a journalist, she wanted to be a famous writer.\u00c2\u00a0 Childhood hopes and dreams don&#8217;t always die, the best of us pursue them to fruition.\u00c2\u00a0 As did Anne, only she didn&#8217;t know this.<\/p>\n<p>The gold Star of David from the clothing, that all Jews had to wear.\u00c2\u00a0 Anne&#8217;s handwritten diary&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Some things are almost too real to be true.<\/p>\n<p>Like man&#8217;s hatred of his fellow man.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We went to the Anne Frank house.\u00c2\u00a0 I was there once before, back in &#8217;72 as Bob Seger would say, but it was different.\u00c2\u00a0 They had flat screens and quotes and&#8230;the diary itself. I didn&#8217;t remember that. It almost didn&#8217;t seem real.\u00c2\u00a0 The house, that is.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s half a century later.\u00c2\u00a0 I was calculating.\u00c2\u00a0 In [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-Y7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3727"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3729,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3727\/revisions\/3729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}