06 October, 2001 - 19:47 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Timeline

I guess that a lot of people have like me, never really associated myself to one particular part of the worlds history. Not as a star player, more like, "Where were you when . . . ."

Tonight I was reading a bit about Anne Frank in the "Smithsonian," magazine.

Suddenly, as a spotlight lighting a particuar thing, I realized that Anne Frank and I were more or less contemporaries, just a few years difference in age between us. It was easy in my mind to place myself back at that age when later I read about her and to suffer mentally the terror that hung over her every waking hour.

In 1933 the Frank family went from Germany to the Netherlands fleeing Nazism when Anne was about 4 years old. In 1943 her family was in hiding in Amsterdam. In June of 1943 Heather and I were married and in 1944 when the Franks hideout was discovered, I was learning to be a father to our first born. Anne was just about 15 years old then when she was sent to the concentration camp.

In later years I kept hearing about the Diary of Anne Frank and from the snips of information about it I had heard, it seemed to be a long ago, far away over the ocean thing in a mind busy trying to learn the business of being a family man and earn a living.

We were close in age, but oh so far apart in freedom to live.

Her remarkable diary will live on into the future as an inspiration to young people I think.

I became acquainted with two young guys from Germany in 1937 at our high school. One was a boy from Poland who came here to live with his uncle who had a business down town, the other boy was from Bavaria and his family was not known to me. I knew they were Jewish and that there was trouble in Germany, but they never gave the slightest hint that anything like that was going in Germany. It was left with the fact that their families wanted them to get an American education. Later on I understood that loving families had managed to get them to America in order to save their lives.

So I had read some of the history of World War Two, followed it in the newspapers, checked seals on the cars of freight trains loaded with military materiel in our yards, sometimes being challenged by military guards, then being allowed to pass. I knew that a war was going on and that the fighting was ferocious and times were very hard for the people in the countries we were fighting.

It was only after the war was over that recountings of what was discovered in the camps, the truth about the , "Final Solution," came into the knowledge of working stiffs like me.

Hard times were easily understood by me, our depression was more or less over and we were on our way back up, but the memory of privation remained. But the thought of the brutality forced on innocent people, the torture, scorn, the theft of self esteem is still unimaginable to me.

My family was waxing and her family was on the wane, what a mockery of civilization it was, that one group of so called humans were taking lives of humans who they considered less than human -- contaminants of the gene pool is what those fools thought !!!

Anne I knew you not and learned of you only later, but I grieve how you were treated and killed. Such a brilliant child suffering such a scurvy, existence and unspeakable death.

Yet, sadly we existed on the same general Time Line . . . . . . .

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