BOOKS – Important reading for International Holocaust Remembrance

THE BETRAYAL OF ANNE FRANK – A COLD CASE INVESTIGATION

By Rosemary Sullivan

Harper Collins

2022, 393 pp

By MEL ROTHENBURGER
ArmchairMayor.ca

This is International Holocaust Remembrance Day (Saturday, Jan 27, 2024) and it has special significance this year as anti-Semitism rises and, all over the world, the question is being asked, “Can it happen again?”

As well as the influence of world events, I’m thinking more intently about the Holocaust this year because, not long after the Oct. 7 slaughter of Jewish innocents by Hamas, I was in Poland and visited Auschwitz, the most infamous of the Nazi death camps.

It has left a lasting impression, and I’ve sought through reading to gain more understanding of what happened. To stand on the very ground, and in the very buildings, where people murdered, was — it’s not an exaggeration to say — a life-altering experience, and I needed to know more.

How could six million Jews be extinguished in a period of less than five years, and by what twisted logic was it done?

Hundreds of books have been written about the Holocaust; I can recommend a few of them.

The first of the books I read is one I purchased in a little shop at the railway gate into the Birkenau camp at Auschwitz where so many died.

It’s called Auschwitz – The Nazis and the Final Solution, by film maker and author Laurence Rees, who researched the subject for years. It’s a tough read. The book explains the process of how Auschwitz began as a Polish army camp, was turned into a prison camp by the Nazis, then into a concentration camp, and then into a death camp in which 1.1 million perished in less than five years.

But the book includes disturbing details of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz, too.

Another important book is titled The Krakow Ghetto Pharmacist by Tadeusz Pankiewicz. It’s an older book and an expensive one but it’s well worth getting hold of if you can because it recounts his experiences in caring for and saving the lives of Jews.

While we were in Krakow, we visited the ghetto, saw the courtyard where Jews were rounded up, and saw the pharmacy building. The book is a testimonial both to man’s inhumanity to man and to the human spirit.

I also have on my bedside table, waiting to be read, the Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland, who was one of the few who escaped from the death camp and lived to tell about it.

Right now, though, I’m reading The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan, a Canadian author who tells the story of a research project that tried to find the identity of who betrayed Anne Frank and her family when they were in hiding in an Amsterdam office annex during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

The family and some of their friends lived undetected in the annex for 25 months until a Gestapo raid found their hiding place. Only Anne’s father, Otto Frank, survived the camps.

The Betrayal of Anne Frank is a recent book and has become controversial as detractors dispute the project’s conclusion about the identity of the betrayer. But besides detailing various suspects, the book provides surprising insights into the bureaucracy of the Nazi’s determination to exterminate Jews. An important piece to their system was to gain the co-operation of the general populace — both non-Jews and Jews — through fear and extortion.

It answers the question: can it happen again? And the answer is frightening to contemplate.