Parallels

The Anne Frank exhibit is in New York City right now, housed in the Center for Jewish History.  It began in January and has now been extended until the end of October, as tickets sold out almost immediately.  We knew that the elders we work with would want to go, so we bought tickets before the exhibit even opened and took two buses of elders and staff to view the exhibit.

Before we went, we spent time talking about Anne Frank and reading sections of The Diary of Anne Frank aloud, both reminding people of the story and discussing this young girl’s life, her remarkable words and her untimely end.  A number of our elders had visited the actual Secret Annex in Amsterdam.  Others shared their own stories, both about the Holocaust and its aftermath as well as their first exposure to the story of Anne Frank.

We expected it to be a powerful day. We expected it to be an emotional experience.  What we did not expect, and no one could have expected, is that it was the day that the Bibas children’s bodies were returned to Israel.

Walking through the exhibit, we learned more about Anne and Margot’s parents, about their families and their early lives. We saw pictures from the Franks’ wedding and their first home together.  But what stopped us all cold were the pictures of the two sisters, Anne and Margot, as young children, at ages not so different from Ariel and Kfir Bibas. The images of the beautiful Bibas brothers, those lively red-headed little boys full of joy, was an echo of the energy we saw in photos of Anne and Margot.  A picture of the two girls with their father, closely tucked into his chest, made all of us think about the picture of Shiri Bibas with her sons. While the Frank family was all smiles, the terror not yet present, the sense of parental connection and love was equally palpable and, at that moment, terribly heartbreaking.

There was a time that all of us would have toured the exhibit, or the house in Amsterdam, and reflected on the words we all know, “never again.”  But we know now that those are just words, that terrible things can and do happen, that children and babies and innocent people, are not spared.  On the contrary, they are targeted, their very innocence seeming to heighten the terrorist’s desires to hurt and kill, to torture and to terrify.

As we walked through the history, the replica of the Franks’ hiding place, the story of what had unfolded, many of us wiped tears from our eyes. The phrase that seemed to come, spontaneously, from all of us was a singular one, “the inhumanity., the inhumanity.”

Our hearts ache for Anne Frank and her family, for the 6 million who lost their lives to senseless murders.  Our hearts break at the loss of so many innocents who have been victims, symbolized so profoundly by the Bibas family.  Our hearts fill with anger at the anti-Semitism that continues and we know that we cannot just say “never again” but must also find ways to stand firm behind, and fight for the truth, of those words.