Postcard from Prinsengracht
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
Florida
Amsterdam: The afternoon was a bit nippy but the warm party atmosphere in the Leidseplein Square in the city center more than made up for it. The Dutch had painted the town literally orange in anticipation of their upcoming football fixture against Mexico. When I arrived at 263 Prinsengracht after a few minutes' walk along a canal’s serpentine curves, I had no idea how quickly the ebullience absorbed along the way would transform into a somber reality check.
The Anne Frank House stood along the Prinsengracht — Amsterdam’s longest canal — just as it did on the morning of Monday, July 6, 1942 when its illustrious inhabitant, Annalise Marie, walked through its doors along with her parents Edith and Otto Frank and her sister Margot. Today the house is a monument — a museum with a story — to the courage and intellect of the young Anne Frank who spent a little over two years there, hiding from the Nazi Germans.
A quote posted in the museum from the April 11, 1944 entry in the diary that Anne had kept meticulously explains it all: “One day this terrible war will be over. The time will come when we will be people again and not just Jews! We can never be just Dutch, or just English, or whatever; we will always be Jews as well. But then we will want to be.”
Anne was spot on that the wicked Nazi ideology’s crux was the exclusivism that pushed everyone outside its pale except those who subscribed to it. A virulent mixture of biology and dogma created the myth about the supremacy of the Aryan race and was deployed to flesh up German hyper-nationalism. A two-nation theory of sorts that made a distinction between the Germans and non-Germans and, worse, between Aryans and non-Aryans, was the Grundnorm of the Third Reich. Jews like Anne were the ultimate victims of this most vicious racism.
Among the artifacts preserved at the Anne Frank House is a Judenstern or the Jewish star, the badge bearing the word Jude (Jew), which the Nazis forced the followers of Judaism to sew on their outermost clothing. Other materials at the museum reference the “Aryan Declaration”, which the Nazi forces imposed on people to confess to their Jewish ancestry.
Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt in June 1929 but moved to Holland with her parents in 1934. Hitler had risen to power the year before and had unleashed the persecution of the Jews, Roma, homosexuals, communists and other political dissenters. Anne’s father Otto made the decision to move into the secret annex he had built behind his Amsterdam office the day his older daughter Margot was called by the Nazis to the Werkverruiming (forced labor camp). Anne Frank, her family and four family friends stayed in that annex for 25 months with help from Otto Frank’s non-Jewish employees. The Nazi security agents eventually captured the eight Jewish inhabitants on August 4, 1944. It is not known who betrayed them. Anne was condemned to Auschwitz and then moved to Bergen-Belsen where she died of malnutrition and typhus fever in March 1945. Her father Otto Frank was the only survivor among this group and decided to turn 263 Prinsengracht into a museum for he used to say, “To build a future, you have to know the past.” He was the one who had given Anne her now famed pink and white check diary in which she chronicled those dreary days poignantly and with a writer’s poise. She wanted to be a fiction writer and a journalist and wrote, “I will make my voice heard, I will go out into the world and work for mankind!” Anne did not live long but her voice has surely been heard around the world. Her diary remains one of the most published books and has been translated into over 70 languages including Arabic, Persian and perhaps Urdu.
From a Pakistani perspective, there will not be a better time to read Anne Frank and read about her than now. Sixty years on to the date of Pakistan’s anti-Ahmedi declaration, which is required to be completed on the country’s national identity card and passport forms, is not much different than the Nazi regime’s Aryan Declaration. Just like the Jews were verbally demonized and then legally relegated to second-class citizenship before being physically exterminated, the Ahmedis in Pakistan face the same fate. Though not constitutionally condemned yet, the Pakistani Shias have been facing a systemic genocide at the hands of the security establishment’s jihadist collaborators. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has just released a damning report, ‘We are the walking dead’, on the killings of Shia Hazaras in Balochistan. HRW grimly notes that the Pakistani authorities have suggested that the Hazara “accept an open-ended ghettoisation, ever increasing curbs on movement and religious observance, and ongoing economic, cultural and social discrimination as the price for staying alive. Yet the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) still finds ways to attack and kill.”
The reason LeJ operates with impunity in Balochistan has to do with the state backing the jihadists of the LeJ to neutralize the Baloch nationalist insurgents. The leader of the Baloch nationalist militants, Dr Allah Nazar Baloch, said in a recently e-mailed statement: “The Pakistani state has long used Islamism as an effective tool to counter the Baloch, Sindhi, Pashtun nationalist movements and to target religious minorities including Shias, Ahmedis, Christians, Hindus and others. This time Pakistan is spreading radicalism at a full scale in Balochistan.” Pakistan and its population at large will perhaps not heed Dr Allah Nazar Baloch’s warning for he believes in an armed struggle for Baloch rights. But did they even listen to Pakistan’s very own Anne Frank, Malala Yousafzai, who spoke through her pen? The way she was maligned even as she struggled for her life after being shot pointblank by a Taliban jihadist smacks of a society rotten to its core. Feted as a rights campaigner around the world, Malala cannot possibly set foot in Pakistan without risking a barrage of bullets and heaps of smears. With the confessional state that Pakistan has become, its trajectory looks perilously similar to that of Nazi Germany with the persecuted ones desperately searching for sanctuary.
Anne Frank’s story imparts shivers down the spine, tears in the eyes, inspiration to the soul and strength for the struggle — all at once. Her courage surely is a shared heritage for the downtrodden and the persecuted everywhere. There are so many people and communities who suffer without their Anne Franks and many others because they do not heed the warnings their very own Anne Franks have given them.
