The never-ending saga of Anne Franks

                                          Sukumaran C. V.

                      The 12 year old Anne Frank (1941) at her school desk
                                          in Amsterdam, the Netherlands   
              

On July 15, 1944, the hardly sixteen year old Anne Frank wrote in her Diary named Kitty: It is utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. 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. After that she could confide to her Dearest Kitty only on July 21 and August 1, 1944.  She, along with her family and others, was captured from the ‘Secret Annexe’ where they had been hiding for two years, by the Nazi secret police Gestapo on August 4, 1944. She was sent to the Bergen- Belsen concentration camp and died there in March 1945, three months before her  16^th  birthday, and barely one month before the Bregen-Belsen was liberated by the Allied Forces.  

We would shudder to think the misery the girl might have suffered during those terrible seven months. On 19^th November 1942, Anne told Kitty: Night after night, green and grey military vehicles cruise the streets. They knock on every door, asking whether any Jews live there…I often see long lines of good, innocent people, accompanied by crying children, walking on and on, ordered about by a handful of men who bully and beat them until they nearly drop. No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children, babies and pregnant women—all are marched to death. On 25^th May 1944, she tells Kitty: …our only choice is to eat fewer… We are going to be hungry, but nothing is worse than being caught. And the worst thing happened on 4^th August, 1944.

Posterity could know the poignant story of Anne Frank, because she was such a gifted girl to write it down. In each war, there are innumerable Anne Franks who perish. In each communal riots there are people like Anne Frank who perish for the reasons that are not theirs and not known to them.

In the 1947 Partition, in the 1984 Delhi, in the 1993 Mumbai, in the 2002 Gujarat, in the 2012 Assam, there might have been many Anne Franks and families who were annihilated. Among the Tamils of Srilanka, among the Adivasis of Central India, among the Palestenians suppressed by Israel and in all (civil)war torn countries of Africa; Anne Franks and families have suffered and still suffer. 

Why it happens? Are we humans basically too narrow minded to accept our plurality and diversity? All humans can’t follow one faith, one life style, one moral code, one dress code and one food habit. As there are diverse ways of life and the very beauty of Human Life and the Environment lies in the plurality, we desperately need to stop trying to make others accept our ways and otherwise calling them the Other and paving the ways to eternal confict and destruction.

Still, even sixty eight years after, we can’t answer the pertinent questions asked by the little girl called Anne Frank. On 3^rd May 1944, she asked: Why are millions spent on the war each day, while not a penny is available for medical science, artists or the poor? Why do people have to starve when mountains of food are rotting away in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy?

Why don’t we, the grown-ups of the world, who write and talk theoratically on everything under the sun incessantly, fail to understand the plain truth the girl tells us? She says (on 3^rd May, 1944): I don’t believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago! There is a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown up will be cut down and destroyed… 

Dear Anne, humanity hasn't still undergone the metamorphosis you referred to 68 years ago. The ‘destructive urge’ still leads us and we still ‘rage, murder and kill’. Not only that, we molest and rape too. On 5^th April 1944, you told your Dearest Kitty that you wanted to go on living even after your death. Oh! Dear girl, you live even after your death and it is doubtless that you will continue to live as long as the human race exists. But what is doubtful is how long the humans will be there on the surface of the Earth with their ‘destructive urge to rage, murder and kill’.