Just Imagine How Interesting It Would Be
“Let me tell you that you have not arrived at a health spa,
but a German concentration camp.
You will find only one exit — the crematorium chimney.
If you don’t like the sound of this,
you can leave at once by throwing yourself on the electric fences.
If any of you are Jews,
you have the right to live no longer than two weeks.
Priests one month.
The rest of you three months.”
Kommandant Rudolph Hoss or one of his subordinates
in the announcement to prisoners arriving at
the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz
If the evangelical, Republican candidate for the Texas 7th Congressional District had any sense of personal and religious integrity, he would immediately resign his pulpit, cover himself in sackcloth and ashes, and sit in the public square imploring God’s mercy for his antisemitic distortion of history in the name of evangelical Christianity.
Harsh?
Perhaps.
We don’t care.
Annelies Marie Frank, born June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, could trace her family’s lineage through centuries of German Jews. In 1933, with the rise of Adolf Hitler, and like so many others, Otto Frank moved his family from their ancestral home to Amsterdam, where he ran a successful spice and jam business. By summer 1939, so many German Jews were fleeting Germany and Austria that the first Jewish refugee center was constructed in the Netherlands. The first refugees – passengers of the St. Louis, a ship that had been moored off Cuba, denied admission to the United States, and, ultimately returned to Europe – helped complete construction of the camp. Between 1933 and 1939, 30,000 Jewish refugees from German and the territories it invaded sought refuge in the Netherlands.
In early May 1940, the Dutch royal family sought escaped to England; within hours, their government followed them. On May 14, 1940, the Luftwaffe began bombing Rotterdam - leaving 80,000 homeless and 850 dead; the following day, the Netherlands officially capitulated and German forces made their way into Amsterdam, where they were greeted by Deputy Mayor Kropman, who expressed the hope that Amsterdam’s Jews would be left in peace. “If the Jews don’t want to see us, we don’t see the Jews,” responded Lieutenant General Von Tiedemann. In the months that followed, hundreds of Jews – anticipating exile to death camps in Germany and Eastern Europe – committed suicide.
The first stench of antisemitic laws – prohibition against kosher slaughter -appeared on August 5; by November all Jewish civil servants. including teachers, were dismissed from their posts, on January 7, 1941 Jews were prohibited from attending cinemas and on February 3 Dutch authorities required “bastard Jews” to register with their municipalities as Jews, Half-Jews, and Quarter-Jews – information that would ultimately lead to their round-up, expulsion and deaths in the gas chambers of the “final solution.” SS officer Friedrich Wimmer, in charge of the registration, explained, “This will ensure the rapid handling of any possible changes, such as relocations.”
In 1942, following the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, Otto arranged hiding for his family in an annex of his warehouse.
In 1942, Anne Frank began writing in the diary she had received as a thirteenth birthday gift from her father. She chronicled everyday experiences, relationships with family and friends, and observations of the increasingly dangerous world in which she lived. On July 5, 19422, her sister Margot became one of the first Jews in the Netherlands to receive notice that she would be sent to a Nazi “work camp” and, fearing deportation to a concentration camp, the Franks took shelter in their “Secret Annex” the next day, quickly joined by the Herman and Auguste Van Pels, their son Peter, and Fritz Pfeffer, a Jewish dentist. They were supported by six of Otto’s employees and Christian friends who brought food and supplies.
The entrance to their secret annex was hidden by a hinged bookcase; the eight lived behind blackout curtains, never daring to flush the toilet during the day for fear of detection.
On July 15, 1942, the first Jews were deported from Amsterdam’s Central Station to the Westerbork transit camp; the same day it left Westerbork for Auschwitz with 1,139 Jews destined for extermination. By the end of 1943, Amsterdam was declared “Judenfrei” – “Jew free”. By Autumn, most Jews had been deported, but many remained in hiding and a special pro-German police force – comprised of virulent antisemites and low-life opportunists who received a premium for every Jew they caught - was established to hunt them down.
Shortly after midnight on June 6, 1944 Allied forces began the largest naval, air and land operation in history with an airborne assault and amphibious landings. Over 18,000 Allied paratroopers were dropped into the invasion area to provide tactical support for infantry divisions on the beaches. Allied air forces flew more than 14,000 sorties. Nearly 7,000 naval vessels – battleships, destroyers, minesweepers, escorts and assault craft -took part in “Operation Neptune,” the naval component of “Overlord.” Naval forces were responsible for escorting and landing 132,000 troops on the beaches of Normandy. Anne made her last diary entry on August 1, 1944 – not knowing that an unknown informer had or would soon betray the “Secret Annex.”
On the morning of August4, members of the German Sicherheitspolizei (secret police) and local police arrived. Two employees who worked on the ground floor of the Secret Annex were arrested, interrogated and taken to a detention center at Amstelveenseweg’. Helper Johannes Kleiman was convicted of “refusal to work” and was ultimately released from confinement because of major medical problems. Victor Kugler was convicted of “helping Jews” and was sent from work camp to work camp across the Netherlands. He was in a crew of 600 prisoners working near the German border when they were fired at by Allied planes – giving him an opportunity to escape. He hid in his home in Hilversu, until the Germans capitulated on May 5.
[Some time after the raid on the Annex building, helpers Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl returned to the empty building, where they discovered Anne’s diary papers, left behind after her arrest. Miep held on to the diary until after the war.]
The Frank and Van Pelz families were sent to the Westerbork detention center. On August 3, they and 1,018 other Jews were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupies Poland, where, two-and-a-half days later, they arrived in the dark of night. It was the last time Otto Frank saw his wife and daughters.
On arrival, people from the Secret Annex were tattooed with their ID their numbers on their arm, showered and received whatever clothing was available. The four women were assigned to a force-labor barracks in Auschwitz-Birkenau, while the men were sent to heavy labor at Auschwitz I, a three-mile walk.
During the night of November 1-2, Anne, Margot and Auguste were transferred – in a two-day train ride – to the Bergen-Belson a concentration camp for Jews and prisoners of war in Northern Germany. Already overcrowded, the camp was a breeding ground for infections and deadly diseases, including typhus.
The Anne Frank House simply reports:
“Margot and Anne Frank contracted spotted typhus and died in February 1945. Nothing is known about their final days.
“(Quote by) Rachel van Amerongen [herself a survivor of Bergen-Belsen. She knew Anne Frank and Margot Frank and remembers their last days.]: ‘One day, they just weren't there anymore.’”
In mid-January 1945, German officials – fearful of the worldwide reaction to the inhumanity of the death camps and the approaching Soviet forces that had already broken through German lines, began emptying and dismantling Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Monowitz, and the sub-camps. Approximately 56,000 prisoners, including Peter van Pels, were force-marched through the snow toward the German interior. The sick and the dying were left in the camps; stragglers and those who could not keep up the pace were killed where they fell. It is presumed that Peter died in the Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945.
Too sick to travel, Otto Frank was scheduled to be exterminated, but, because the terrified German forces fled before the oncoming Russian troops, he was among the 8,000 prisoners left behind to survive on their own
During the evening of June 3, 1945, having made his way to Katowice (in southern Poland) and Odessa (in today’s Ukraine} to Amsterdam, Otto Frank appeared on the doorstep of Jan and Miep Gies; he was immediately united with his former employees and helpers. In July, he met sisters Janny and Lientje Brilleslijper, who had been imprisoned with Anne and Margot at Bergen-Belsen and informed him that his daughters had died of typhus. Happily for History, Miep had guarded Anne’s diary, which he gifted to Otto, who eventually found the courage to compile and publish a manuscript for the ages.
On April 3, 1946, the Dutch newspaper Het Parool published well-known historian Jan Romein’s “A Child’s Voice,” writing enthusiastically about Anne Frank’s diary, without mentioning her name. He called it “intelligent,” “human,” “written in admirably pure and sober Dutch,” and “a flawless insight into human nature.” It also shined a penetrating light on Nazi crimes. The Secret Annex: Diary Letters from 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944 was published on June 25, 1947. It has been in print ever since.
In it, Anne Frank mused:
“Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the ‘Secret Annexe.’”
Enter shyster from Texas. His inexplicable need to rewrite History and put a “Jesus Is Lord spin” on everything is so gut-wrenching, we’ll use excerpts from The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 31, 2022:
The Republican nominee for Congress in Texas’ 7th district is a self-proclaimed history buff, but his take on Anne Frank is not one that most historians would endorse.
Johnny Teague, an evangelical pastor and business owner who won the district’s primary in March, in 2020 published “The Lost Diary of Anne Frank,” a novel imagining the famous Jewish Holocaust victim’s final days in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps as she might have written them in her diary.
The kicker: In Teague’s telling, Frank seems to embrace Christianity just before she is murdered by the Nazis.
…the speculative book attempts to faithfully extend the writing style of Frank’s “original” diary entries into her experiences in the camps: it “picks up where her original journey left off,” according to the promotional summary. Teague claims to have interviewed Holocaust survivors and visited the Anne Frank House, multiple concentration camps and the major Holocaust museums in Washington, D.C., and Israel as part of his research.
“I would love to learn more about Jesus and all He faced in His dear life as a Jewish teacher,” Teague’s Anne Frank character muses at one point, saying that her dad had tried to get her a copy of the New Testament. Anne’s father Otto Frank, who in real life did survive the Holocaust, seems to have been spared a tragic fate in Teague’s telling because of his interest in learning about Jesus.
Later, Anne does learn about Jesus through other means, reciting psalms and expressing sympathy for Jesus’ plight.
By book’s end, Anne is firm in her belief that “every Jewish man or woman should ask” questions like “Where is the Messiah? … Did He come already, and we didn’t recognize Him?”
Teague, responding to a query from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after the story’s initial publication, said his book had been “misrepresented” and that it shows Frank “relating her suffering to the historic persecution by Egypt, Haman, Assyria, Rome and others - all horrific facts of how the precious Jewish people have been attacked for so many centuries.”
Teague said he based Frank’s interpretation of Jesus off of a reference in her original diary to her father wanting her and her sister Margot “to be exposed to the New Testament and the life of Jesus” and, “As she made those entries in her own hand, I could not pretend that the thoughts, lessons, or questions of Jesus never crossed her mind afterward.” He also said he included Jesus because “when the Jewish people were suffering so much torment and suffering, it is impossible to imagine them not contemplating in their turmoil the longing for a Messiah to rescue them.”
While Teague’s version of Frank doesn’t explicitly indicate she wants to convert to Christianity, she makes many comments praising Christians she meets in the concentration camp, noting of one woman, “What I love about her is her faith in God and her faith in Jesus.” Later, Frank says, “I am seeing a stark difference in some of the Christians here, as opposed to the others… It seems Christians are more willing to die than the rest of us.”
Teague says such passages don’t necessarily represent a full conversion to Christianity. “Do I think Anne Frank became a Christian? No one can know what spiritual decisions or conclusions people make in a time of tragedy and persecution,” Teague continued. “This book does not indicate either way.”
He added, “We must stand with the Jewish people and for them.”
No, Mr. Teague! No you don’t!
Your attempt to make Anne Frank a possible wanna-be-Christian is the fullest expression of Christian Nationalism. It’s as antisemitic as it gets!
Mr. Teague, Europe’s Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Lutherans, Anglicans, Romas (Gypsies), Roman and Orthodox Catholics, physically and mentally challenged, disabled, LGBTQ and others were killed simply because of who they were and/or how they prayed. They were killed by political leaders and their terrified sycophants who followed their Fuhrer without question or mercy.
Our Churches have a term for why they died: in Odium Fidei – “hatred of the Faith.”
Look it up. Study it.
Leave your fevered need to bring Jesus into everything out of it.
[Mr. Teague lost his bid for Congress on November 8.
He received on 36.3% of the vote.
Gloria Tibi Domine!]