Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001) TV MINI SERIES
(FULL MOVIE)
Anne Frank played by Hannah Taylor Gordon
Language: English
Won 2 Primetime Emmys
IMDb link
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Books to read in autumn
Historical novels
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: England in the 1520s
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett: Building the most splendid Gothic cathedral the world has ever known
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon: A back-in-time Scottish romance
Company of Liars by Karen Maitland: A novel of the plague in the year 1348
The underground railroad by Colson Whitehead: Enslavement of African Americans through escape and flight
The God of small things by Arundhati Roy: A family drama in the 60s located in India
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank: A powerful reminder of the horrors of world war II
Fantasy
A Game of thrones by George R. R. Martin: A Fantasy epic run by politics, strong families, dragons
Red rising by Pierce Brown: A dystopian science fiction novel set in a future colony on Mars
Babel by R.F. Kuang: Student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire
Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree: A fresh take on fantasy staring an orc and a mercenary
Jade City by Fonda Lee: A gripping Godfather-esque saga of intergenerational blood feuds, vicious politics, magic, and kungfu
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik: A tale of hope and magic, with brave maidens and scary monsters
The Atlas six by Olivie Blake: A dark academic sensation following six magicians
Mysteries & Horror
The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror by various authors: Short stories perfect for the Halloween mood
Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon: The story of Vern, a pregnant teenager who escapes the cult Cainland
The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher: A noted cultural critic unearths the weird, the eerie, and the horrific in 20th-century culture through a wide range of literature, film, and music
Holly by Stephen King: Disappearances in a midwestern town
Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas: Supernatural western
The good house by Tananarive Due: A classic New England tale that lays bare the secrets of one little town
Nonfiction
Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey: The trail of America's ghosts
What moves the dead by T. Kingfisher: A gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher
South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry: A journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South—and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America
All the living and the dead by Hayley Campbell: An exploration of the death industry and the people―morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners―who work in it and what led them there
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more
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Introduction
Name: Just call me Raven.
Dream: Become a published novelist.
Hobbies: play the harp, bake, cook, read, sew, go on walks outside, watch YouTube, storytelling
Likes: Opera, Celtic themes, food, true crime stories, history, fantasy and scifi, the coast, faith, family, scambaiting, and great stories
Favorite Books: Harry Potter series, The Giver, Mistborn, Uglies, Frankenstein, The Two Princesses of Bamarre, Jane Eyre, A Walk to Remember, Silas Marner, The Otherworld, The Hunger Games, Ender's Game, The Chronicles of Narnia, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, Jacob Have I Loved, Forestborn, Defy the Stars, Tom Sawyer
My WIP's:
The Blood Cleaners (YA dystopia)
Columbus Day (YA scifi)
The Keeper of Maralla (unconventional high fantasy)
The Star House Club (MG/YA urban fantasy)
Brigid Aideen Quinn (sci-fi fantasy superhero)
Sanctuary Calling (Space sci-fi Dystopia)
Voice of Shadows (high fantasy)
The Enchantress (MG fantasy)
New Victoria (steampunk sci-fi)
My Social Media Links:
twitter.com/eccentric_raven
nanowrimo.org/participants/raven_heart
tiktok.com/@the_eccentric_raven
pinterest.com/teccentricraven
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Separated from his family, he searched for his two daughters.
He was like many others, after Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945 - He had hopes that his family might have survived . . .
Under Adolf Hitler's leadership, the Nazi regime had killed an estimated 6 million Jewish people and millions of other victims whom he and his followers deemed Untermenschen ("sub-humans") and socially undesirable, including 2 million Romani people, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men.
He was hoping he would find his wife and two daughters. Five years earlier, when he and his family had realized Hitler's racially motivated ideology was promoting hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice, he tried to get his family out of Germany, but he had run afoul of restrictive American immigration policies designed to protect national security and guard against an influx of foreigners.
He had written his American friend, "I am forced to look out for emigration and as far as I can see U.S.A. is the only country we could go to. Perhaps you remember that we have two girls. It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for. Our own fate is of less importance."
America had, however, changed its attitude toward immigrants, especially refugees, who were fleeing war torn countries.
He would eventually find out that his wife was dead. She had died of starvation in one of the concentration camps. He still had hopes that his daughters may have survived, but those hopes were soon shattered as well.
He returned to the hiding place, in which he and his family hid for two years, now empty, only filled with sad memories. A trusted friend of the family met him and gave him some papers, which turned out to be the diaries of his daughter. She had died at the age of 15 at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
He remembered that his daughter was so full of hope, she had wanted to be a writer, she wanted her diaries to be published after the war. At first he was hesitant, but his daughter always dreamed of improving the world, and he realized that his daughter's words could help.
She had written in that diary, "It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart."
Otto Frank would publish his daughter's diary so others would never forget. The title of the publication became known as "The Diary of a Young Girl" or Anne Frank's Diary.
~~~~~
Friday, January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Peace Page has shared many stories of Anne Frank, her family, and life during that terrible time. This is an updated story with new insights. The Jon S. Randal Peace Page focuses on past and present stories seldom told of lives forgotten, ignored, or dismissed. The stories are gathered from writers, journalists, and historians to share awareness and foster understanding. You can find more stories in the Peace Page archives. We encourage you to learn more about the individuals mentioned here and to support the writers, educators, and historians whose words we present.
~~~~~
“In his message for the International Day, UN Secretary-General António Guterres notes that the Holocaust was the culmination of thousands of years of antisemitic hate, aided by the decision of so many to do nothing to stop the Nazis.”
“It was the deafening silence – both at home and abroad – that emboldened them”.
“This, he continues, was despite Nazi Germany’s hate speech and disinformation campaigns, contempt for human rights and the rule of law, the glorification of violence and tales of racial supremacy, and disdain for democracy and diversity.
“In the face of growing economic discontent and political instability, escalating white supremacist terrorism, and surging hate and religious bigotry – we must be more outspoken than ever,” added the UN chief, drawing a parallel between the Holocaust and the present day.”
One of the exhibitions on displacement illustrates the stereotyping, misinformation, and conspiracy theories used by the Nazis, to vilify Jews, Roma, migrants, LGBTQIA+, or other groups.
~~~~~
In an NBC News report:
"The story of teenage diarist Anne Frank is known across the world. But a new survey suggests a “disturbing” lack of awareness about the Holocaust in the Netherlands, where she and her family hid for years before being discovered and deported to a Nazi concentration camp.
A Dutch Holocaust survivor and Jewish cultural leaders have expressed dismay at the survey, which was released Wednesday and suggests that more than half of the residents were not aware of the deportation and murder of Jews from the country during World War II.
The survey, conducted and released by the New York-based nonprofit Claims Conference ahead of International Holocaust Memorial Day on Friday, found that 53% of the respondents couldn’t identify the Netherlands as a country where the events of the Holocaust happened — rising to 60% among millennial and Gen Z respondents, meaning those under 40.
Historians estimate more than 70% of the Netherlands’ prewar Jewish population was killed during the Holocaust, more than 100,000 in total. Frank hid in a secret room in Amsterdam with her family from 1942 to 1944 before she died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp weeks before its liberation.
Despite widely available evidence of the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews, 12% of those surveyed told the researchers either that the Holocaust was a myth or that the number of deaths was greatly exaggerated — the highest figure for any of the six nations surveyed in recent years. For the Netherlands, this rises to 23% of people under 40.
~~~~~
In an article by Melinda Houston of The Sydney Morning Herald, she asks, “How many US citizens know their country refused a visa to the family of Anne Frank – a refusal that forced them into hiding in Amsterdam and ultimately resulted in their deaths?”
Writing about Ken Burns documentary, “The US and the Holocaust”, Houston states, “That’s the shocking fact that opens this typically sober, lyrical and exquisitely balanced documentary from Ken Burns.”
In the documentary, Burns presents information which Houston presents, saying, “In the 1890s, the US was indeed the promised land and its doors were wide open to immigrants. It was also a time of genocide of Native Americans. And the flourishing of slavery.”
~~~~~
In the new book, “After The Annex: Anne Frank, Auschwitz and Beyond”, author Bas von Benda-Beckmann “pieces together the chilling final months of the Jewish teenager and her family,” according to Chris Dean For Mailonline.
“He reveals harrowing stories about a friend’s attempts to throw food parcels over a barbed-wire fence to a starving and freezing Anne, as well as the punishing work she was given splitting open old batteries with a chisel and hammer.”
Anne, who would be 93 if she was alive today, and her family hid from Nazi persecution in the annex behind a bookcase in their Amsterdam home for two years before being caught.
~~~~~
According to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, Antisemitic hate crimes have been rising in recent years, and could surpass 2021 numbers — a possible record year.
PBS Newshour also reports that The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks anti-Semitic behavior nationwide, found 2,717 incidents in 2021. That's a 34 percent rise from the year before and averages out to more than seven anti-Semitic incidents per day.
~~~~~
According to The Post and Courier, “we should remember that too many ordinary people did little or nothing to try to stop the Holocaust at the time. Yes, there were heroes such as Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler, but far too many others were aware of what was happening and remained bystanders.”
“We cannot rely on heroic individuals to be the difference,” says Doyle Stevick, University of South Carolina education professor and director of the school’s Anne Frank Center. “We need to build communities of upstanders.”
“To remember is not a passive, intellectual activity. It’s an active commitment to live the values that would have allowed every Anne Frank to live to her full potential. That’s the summons that we all should heed when we remember January 27.”
“Lessons about the Holocaust go beyond a significant chapter of World War II, beyond the 6 million victims killed by a totalitarian regime. They extend to the vital and ongoing importance of our coming together and understanding one another, wherever we happen to be.”
~ jsr
The Jon S. Randal Peace Page
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fave books of 2023
(not necessarily published this year & no rereads)
Short Stories:
The Six Deaths of the Saint by Alix E. Harrow
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
Literary Fiction:
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
We Spread by Iain Reid
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman
Fantasy & Horror:
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow
Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh
Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher
Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
All that Consumes Us by Erica Waters
Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson
Graphic Novels:
The Garlic duology by Bree Paulsen
Heartstopper Vol. 5 by Alice Oseman
Children's & Picture Books:
The Frog and Toad series by Arnold Lobel
The Brambly Hedge series by Jill Barklem
Snow & Rose by Emily Winfield Martin
Leina and the Lord of Toadstools by Myriam Dahman et al.
The Moomin series by Tove Jansson
Faeries of the Faultlines by Iris Compiet
Poetry:
Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad by Alice Oswald
Brand New Ancients by Kae Tempest
Non-Fiction:
It's Not About the Burqa edited by Mariam Khan
The End of Marriage by Emilia Roig
BFFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship by Anahit Behrooz
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
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Irena's Vow
I have many heroes from WWII: Anne Frank, Irena Sendler, Stefania Podgorska, Oskar Schindler…just to name a few. Back in my teens or early twenties, I was reading “Sister Freaks,” by Rebecca St. James and stumbled across a woman of faith I never heard of before: Irene Gut Opdyke. I did further research on line and learned there was a book I just had to read! When I read her story, I wanted to cry for all she did and all she had been through, but she kept the faith and persevered.
Irene Gut Opdyke (born Irena Gut, 5 May 1922 – 17 May 2003) was a Polish nurse who gained international recognition for aiding Polish Jews persecuted by Nazi Germany during World War II. She was honored as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for risking her life to save twelve Jews.
That’s just a small bit from the Wikipedia article on her. You can find the complete version here. But don’t stop there, read her book: “In My Hands” to read her full story. You can buy it at Amazon.
“No matter how many Holocaust stories one has read, this one is a must, for its impact is so powerful.”–School Library Journal, starred
I did not ask myself, “Should I do this?” but “How will I do this?”
Through this intimate and compelling memoir, we are witness to the growth of a hero. Much like The Diary of Anne Frank, In My Hands has become a profound testament to individual courage.
You must understand that I did not become a resistance fighter, a smuggler of Jews, a defier of the SS and the Nazis, all at once.
When the war began, Irene Gut was just seventeen: a student nurse, a Polish patriot, a good Catholic girl. Forced to work in a German officers’ dining hall, she learns how to fight back.
One’s first steps are always small: I had begun by hiding food under a fence.
Irene eavesdropped on the German’s plans. She smuggled people out of the work camp. And she hid twelve Jews in the basement of a Nazi major’s home. To deliver her friends from evil, this young woman did whatever it took–even the impossible.
Her story was later told on Broadway, in a play called “Irena’s Vow.” Tovah Feldshuh portrayed Irena.
And now Irena’s story is told in a new movie by the same name. She is portrayed by Sophie Nélisse, who played Liesel Meminger in “The Book Thief” years ago. Check out this article about it!
“Irena’s Vow” was recently shown at TIFF – Toronto International Film Festival and you can vote for it here, to be picked up and shown at theaters! Please share this info, Irena’s story should continue to be told.
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Reflections on a Year of Reading German Literature
Titles Read:
The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Refugee - Alan Grantz
The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
These books are from different countries and different time periods, but they all have a common thread of highlighting the resilience of the human spirit in times of adversity. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is set in Nazi Germany during World War II and follows the life of a young girl named Liesel, who finds solace in books during the darkest moments of her life.It’s setting is in Germany in the beginning when the Nazi is taking power. It portrays the power of literature and storytelling to provide hope and a sense of humanity in times of war and oppression, in Liesel's case while being a non jew she sees the events caused by Hitler first hand, it’s oppression and discrimination against Jews. The unnecessary violence, the construction of concentration camps, and forced relocation of Jews all taking place in the 1900s and through these hardships people managed to persist and survive using hope and family and friends (theme).
Refugee by Alan Grantz is a fiction novel 3 stories each based on a refugee child each from 3 countries - Syria, Nazi Germany, and Cuba. It shows the bravery and persistence of each refugee in their pursuit of a better freer, and life, despite the many struggles and dangers they go against. Joseph a Jew from the Nazi Germany story, experienced tragic losses with separation and death. Joseph and his family dreamt of an end of running and hiding while triumphing over many obstacles still dies at the end. Sacrificing himself and his mother to save Joseph’s sister Ruthie from the concentration camps. After both the mother and Joseph die in the concentration camp. Signifying the theme throughout the Nazi’s era and its stories caused a lot more deaths than dreams coming true and everyone surviving.
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is a first hand experience of an adolescent Jewish girl's life in hiding during the Nazi rise to power of the Netherlands and Germany. It provides an introduction and story into the daily struggles and hopes of a young girl facing discrimination and forced to hide from the world - specifically the Nazi’s. Also highlights the importance of family, friends and a positive attitude towards the conflict. However Anne Frank was unable to survive World War II and Hitler’s reign even after all the safety precautions taken to avoid relocation to a concentration camp and death she couldn’t survive. Showing that the theme is life doesn’t always go your way
From these 3 books I read over the last 20 weeks, I learned that humanity can prevail even the darkest moments in history. These books show that hope, resilience, bravery, and a belief in a better future are essential to overcoming impossible situations that seem scarce in survival. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak you’re able to see the bond she makes in her new family when they open up and comfort Liesel during these tough times, like when Mr. Hubermann comforts Liesel commonly at night when she has a nightmare. Also, Refugee by Alan Grantz in Joseph’s story, Joseph in such a dark and dangerous moment in history that he bravely sacrificed himself so his sister would be spared, showing the resilience and courage Joseph had to save his sister like a highly responsible big brother. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, I remember while hiding in the annex from the Nazi’s, debris, and the missiles they persevered through hope, and resilience together as if by blood. They experienced tough times like being supplied with less rations and near caught experiences with the Nazi’s.
After these 20 weeks of Independent Reading I’ve learned more about myself concerning books and more about time management. For starters I’ve read business and personal finance books on the side before Independent Reading to become more financially literate. After reading more storytelling stories both nonfiction and fiction I’ve learned that I preferred reading finance books. Mainly because of the useful knowledge you gain about your future but also because the stories related to Germany are usually boring. In general I find books and reading boring. I’ve given it my best try and with an open mind but it never clicked with me. This Independent Reading assignment feels more like a chore than an actual thing I look forward to doing. On the other hand, while it feels like a chore I was able to adapt to my busy schedule and continue to read 10 pages everyday right after school and had time to go to work after.
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List of all the books I’ve read
just wanted to keep a list of what I’ve read throughout my life (that I can remember)
Fiction:
“The Outsiders,” SE Hinton
“The Weirdo,” Theodore Taylor
“The Devil’s Arithmetic,” Jane Yolen
“Julie of the Wolves series,” Jean Craighead George
“Soft Rain,” Cornelia Cornelissen
“Island of the Blue Dolphins,” Scott O’Dell
“The Twilight series,” Stephanie Mayer
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee
“Gamer Girl,” Mari Mancusi
“Redwall / Mossflower / Mattimeo / Mariel of Redwall,” Brian Jacques
“1984,” and “Animal Farm,” George Orwell
“Killing Mr. Griffin,” Lois Duncan
“Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain
“Rainbow’s End,” Irene Hannon
“Cold Mountain,” Charles Frazier
“Between Shades of Gray,” Ruta Sepetys
“Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe,” Edgar Allen Poe
“Lord of the Flies,” William Golding
“The Great Gatsby,” F Scott Fitzgerald
“The Harry Potter series,” JK Rowling
“The Fault in Our Stars,” “Looking for Alaska,” and “Paper Towns,” John Green
“Thirteen Reasons Why,” Jay Asher
“The Hunger Games series,” Suzanne Collins
“The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” Stephen Chbosky
“Fifty Shades of Grey,” EL James
“Speak,” and “Wintergirls,” Laurie Halse Anderson
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood
“Mama Day,” Gloria Naylor
“Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Bronte
“Wide Sargasso Sea,” Jean Rhys
“The Haunting of Hill House,” Shirley Jackson
“The Chosen,” Chaim Potok
“Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman
“Till We Have Faces,” CS Lewis
“One Foot in Eden,” Ron Rash
“Jim the Boy,” Tony Earley
“The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox,” Maggie O’Farrell
“A Land More Kind Than Home,” Wiley Cash
“A Parchment of Leaves,” Silas House
“Beowulf,” Seamus Heaney
“The Silence of the Lambs / Red Dragon / Hannibal / Hannibal Rinsing,” Thomas Harris
“Cry the Beloved Country,” Alan Paton
“Moby Dick,” Herman Melville
“The Hobbit / The Lord of the Rings trilogy / The Silmarillion,” JRR Tolkien
“Beren and Luthien,” JRR Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien
“Children of Blood and Bone / Children of Virtue and Vengeance,” Tomi Adeyemi
“Soundless,” Richelle Mead
“The Girl with the Louding Voice,” Abi Dare
“A Song of Ice and Fire series / Fire and Blood,” GRR Martin
“A Separate Peace,” John Knowles
“The Bluest Eye,” and “Beloved,” Toni Morrison
“Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley
“The Giver / Gathering Blue / Messenger / Son,” Lois Lowry
“The Ivory Carver trilogy,” Sue Harrison
“The Grapes of Wrath,” and “Of Mice and Men,” John Steinbeck
“The God of Small Things,” Arundhati Roy
“Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury
“The Night Circus,” Erin Morgenstern
“Sunflower Dog,” Kevin Winchester
“The Catcher in the Rye,” JD Salinger
“The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” Sherman Alexie
“The Good Girl,” Mary Kubica
“The Last Unicorn,” Peter S Beagle
“Slaughterhouse Five,” Kurt Vonnegut Jr
“The Joy Luck Club,” Amy Tan
“The Sworn Virgin,” Kristopher Dukes
“The Color Purple,” Alice Walker
“Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Zora Neale Hurston
“The Light Between Oceans,” ML Stedman
“Yellowface,” RF Kuang
“A Flicker in the Dark,” Stacy Willingham
“One Piece Novel: Ace’s Story,” Sho Hinata
Non-fiction:
“Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl,” Anne Frank
“Night,” Elie Wiesel
“Invisible Sisters,” Jessica Handler
“I Am Malala,” Malala Yousafzai
“The Interesting Narrative,” Olaudah Equiano
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” Rebecca Skloot
“Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Harriet Jacobs
“The Princess Diarist,” Carrie Fisher
“Adulting: How to Become a Grown Up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps,” Kelly Williams Brown
“How to Win Friends and Influence People,” Dale Carnegie
“Carrie Fisher: a Life on the Edge,” Sheila Weller
“Make ‘Em Laugh,” Debbie Reynolds and Dorian Hannaway
“How to be an Anti-Racist,” Ibram X Kendi
“Maus,” Art Spiegelman
“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou
“Wise Gals: the Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage,” Nathalia Holt
“Persepolis,” and “Persepolis II,” Marjane Satrapi
“How to Write a Novel,” Manuel Komroff
“The Nazi Genocide of the Roma,” Anton Weiss-Wendt
“Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz,” Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel
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Animation Night 149: Toei
Hi there. It’s Thursday. You know what that means (yes, it means i’m freeeeee)
Today we will be rolling back to some of the earliest days of anime!
The story of Toei goes back to 1946. In the immediate aftermath of WWII, there were very few games in town when it came to Japanese animation (or, to be fair, animation in most places). During the war, animators had been recruited to make propaganda films such as Momotaro: Sacred Sailors, among them Akira Daikuhara.
In the immediate aftermath, Kenzō Masoaka (of Benkei tai Ushiwaka, for anyone who remembers AN24) began the first effort to make an animated film post-war. This film was titled Sakura: Haru no genso (Cherry Blossom: Spring’s Fantasy); it was followed by a series of three films about a cat called Tora-Chan. But Masoaka’s studio struggled, constantly closing and re-opening. At the time it was operating under the name 日本動画映画 Nihon Dōga Eiga or Japan Animated Films, or just the abbreviation 日動映画 Nichidō Eiga. In 1956, they were bought by live action studio Toei (itself approaching 20 years old, founded in 1938) and renamed to Toei Dōga, where they started making increasingly elaborate animated films.
Toei of this era was sometimes called the rather patronising name ‘Disney of the East’. There is some truth to it, in that their ambition, especially in the early years, was certainly to make animated films as elaborate as those of old Walt. Their first feature was 白蛇伝 Hakujaden (1958), based on a Song Dynasty Chinese legend about a lost pet snake who transforms into a woman in the hopes of reuniting with her former owner, a monk who thinks that’s sus, and two pandas who try to sort it all out; in English it’s variously translated as The White Snake Enchantress, Legend of the White Serpent or even Panda and the Magic Serpent.
Part of the goal of the film, to Toei Dōga president Hiroshi Ōkawa, was a gesture of reconciliation towards China after the whole ‘invading and occupying’ thing.
The film was Rintarō’s first animation job; it also left a massive impression on a young Hayao Miyazaki, who wrote the following in Gekkan ehon bessatsu: Animēshon (1979), trans. Beth Cary and Frederik L Schodt in Starting Point:
What I’m saying here is that when young people feel attracted to the heroes of a tragedy [context: such as The Diary of Anne Frank], whether in animation or other media, a type of narcissism is really involved; this attraction they feel is a surrogate emotion for something they have lost.
From personal experience, I can say that I first fell in love with animation when I saw Hakujaden, the animated feature produced by Toei Animation in 1958. I can still remember the pangs of emotion I felt at the sight of the incredibly beautiful, young female character Bai-Niang, and how I went to see the film over and over as a result. It was like being in love, and Bai-Niang became a surrogate girlfriend for me at a time when I had none.
It is in this sense that I think we can achieve a type of satisfaction, by substituting something for the unfulfilled portion of our lives.
The feelings evoked by Bai-Niang may go some way to explaining the role of similar girls in Miyazaki’s movies...
Hakujaden has some curious properties as a work of animation. It was, especially for the time, astonishingly elaborate and straining the technical capabilities of the industry (although the claim on Wikipedia that it had 13,590 staff seems rather dubious lmao). The drawing count is stratospheric thanks most scenes being animated on ones and twos - the opposite of the limited animation techniques that anime would later perfect. Despite that, it is also the work of an inexperienced team, and compared to later works its animation can feel awkwardly timed, the flood of inbetweens turning everything to mush.
Nevertheless, there are two stars of the show in terms of animation. One is Yasuji Mori, who would later be one of Toei’s star animators, creating scenes such as the dance at the beginning of this post - as well as teaching Miyazaki after he joined Toei. The other is Akira Daikuhara, who was way ahead of the game on effects animation, creating the film’s transformation sequences. Daikuhara would go on to be one of Toei’s main animators of human characters, while Mori tended to take the animal/mascots; he has been a relatively forgotten figure, although that’s starting to change with articles like these ones by Matteo Watzky, whose research just digs deeper and deeper.
Toei’s early films tend to follow the precedent set in Hakujaden, adapting folktales from (mostly) China and Japan. In 1959 they covered a Japanese story in Shōnen Sarutobi Sasuke; 1960, they took on Saiyūki (Journey to the West); then Anju to Zushiōmaru (The Orphan Brother, 1961) and Arabian Nights: The Adventures of Sinbad (1962).
In this period of Toei, there was a lot of ambition, and also a feeling of inadequacy compared to the elaborate animated films being made in other countries. Hayao Miyazaki, who joined Toei in the 1963, wrote in 1982:
I used to create feature-length works for Toei Animation, but compared to the works just mentioned, they were obviously far inferior, at least technically. Sort of like showing rabbits slipping and falling, that sort of thing. We wondered if we would ever catch up to the level of what was being done in America, France or Russia, or if it were even possible to do so. Frankly, we really didn’t know.
To begin with, we didn’t even know what we had to do to reach the same level of excellent as the best works out there. We knew we had constraints, such as short production schedules, small budgets and so forth, but above and beyond that, we began to develop an inferiority complex: we wondered if we even had the basic talent needed to proceed. In retrospect, the only thing that probably kept us going, and drove us to pursue such a long-term goal, was our determination.
Miyazaki’s words should be taken with a grain of salt, since they definitely suit his personal myth-making. Still, conditions at Toei in the 60s were rough, leading to the first major unionisation struggle of anime history, which I wrote about in AN70. The studio started bringing on part-timers paid hourly rather than a salary, and created severe pay discrepancies, which were met with strikes and departures from the studio. Saiyūki took such a tole on its director Taiji Yabushita that he was hospitalised; Yasuji Mori would later create the term ‘anime syndrome’ for this sort of overwork because it was not the last time by any means.
However, I’m going to zoom over all of these to get to the わんぱく王子の大蛇退治 Wanpaku Ōji no Orochi Taiji (The Naughty Prince’s Orōchi Slaying, more commonly translated The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon) in 1963 - not because it’s necessarily more important, although it’s remembered as one Toei’s best films, but because I happen to have a fantastic analysis of one of its key scenes on hand thanks to AniObsesive and Toadette.
Wanpaku Ōji breaks from precedent in many ways, particularly its visual design, which takes on highly simplified shapes reminiscent of the then ultra-modern UPA style by way of haniwa figures. The story at least follows the pattern, adapting a Shinto myth in which the storm god Susanoo battles (guess what) an eight-headed dragon Yamat no Orochi. Susanoo is motivated by the death of his mother Izanami, and goes on a journey to try to find her, which leads him to the village of Princess Kushinada - a village with a dragon problem, which they’ve kept at bay only by sacrificing Kushinada’s seven sisters. Susanoo, horny for a princess who looks like his mum, decides it’s time to intervene.
The dance scene above comes in the middle of the movie, in which the goddess Ame-no-Uzume performs an increasingly mystical dance. It was an ambitious experiment of Makoto Nagasawa, who had joined as an inbetweener on Saiyūki, with large spacing and broad motion to create a snappy feeling. Animation Obsessive writes:
Typical motion at Toei, Nagasawa said, would be “neatly in-betweened from the first [key] pose to the last [key] pose.” In other words, in-betweens smoothed out the movement and made it longer, more complete and more realistic. By contrast, Nagasawa’s drawings of Uzume are often at wide intervals, with minimal in-betweens. Sometimes, she basically teleports from one frame to the next.
Even when the intervals aren’t that wide, the way Uzume moves remains big, broad, clear and non-real. Nagasawa pushes her gestures, increases her speed, shows us only what he wants to show us. The action is crisp, always holding its abstract shape. No naturalistic touches distract from the core form of what Uzume does.
Alongside Nagasawa, Yasuji Mori was now coming into a role close to that of the now-standard 作画監督 sakuga kantoku aka sakkan or animation director, an experienced artist whose job is to correct the drawings from many different key animators to keep them on-model. Modern anime productions tend to have a strictly hierarchical approach where the characters are designed by one or a few character designers, usually also the lead sakkan. At Toei, things had been a bit more fluid - the individual animators would often design the characters they were going to animate, with a division of labour closer to the old Disney style. On this film, it became more of a hybrid: Mori drew the final model sheets, but the animators would submit suggested designs to him.
For the most elaborate scenes, such as the dance, they went to great lengths to record a suitable score and record live-action footage with professional ballet dancers. I encourage you to read the AniObsessive article for the details.
At the time of Wanpaku Ōji, Toei was starting to face competition. The already-renowned mangaka Osamu Tezuka had founded MushiPro, which was rapidly taking over TV, and the sphere of TMS satellite studios were starting to get going and siphon away many of their best people such as Yasuo Ōtsuka. Still, the animators at Toei were determined to try and stand alongside international animators:
The team was well aware of the trends in world animation at that time. According to Nagasawa, they were watching work from Canada (Norman McLaren), Czechoslovakia (Jiří Trnka), Russia (The Snow Queen), France (The King and the Mockingbird) and so on. It was all bold, new animation. In The Little Prince, Toei took up the challenge this work presented, without simply copying it. The team contributed to modern animation while staying rooted in the ancient, and in Japan itself.
Subsequently, Japanese animation is sometimes divided into a ‘Toei tradition’ vs. a ‘MushiPro tradition’, of full vs limited animation respectively, followed by the various successors such as Ghibli on the one hand and Madhouse on the other. As ever this is not really very accurate, and both ‘lineages’ crossed over extensively (just look at Kanada).
Toei’s own output adapted to the times. Takahata’s Horus: Prince of the Sun (AN 70) might be the last of the ambitious movies in their old style; after this, the fairytale films were gradually replaced by gekiga animation such as Tiger Mask, super robots like Mazinger Z, and then at the end of the 70s increasingly science fiction adaptations of Leiji Matsumoto’s works (AN 146). In the 80s, shōnen exploded onto the scene and Toei made a lot of Dragon Ball and Saint Seiya, later joined by other franchises like PreCure, Digimon and One Piece. So Toei remains one of the largest and most robust animation studios in Japan. They’ve got a lot of salaried staff, a union(!), and regular work in the form of wildly popular franchises. But occasionally they’ll make something cool and weird within that remit, like Hosoda’s One Piece film (AN61), Kyōsōgiga (AN98) - or Interstella 5555 which we watched last week.
So! Tonight though we’re going to go back and look at those ambitious early days, where it started, with snakes and dragons and a bishōjo who’s 美 enough to inspire the entire career of Hayao Miyazaki. Animation Night 149 will begin at 20:00 UK time (UTC), (13:00 California time), at twitch.tv/canmom - hope to see you there!
And next week I have a serious treat for you, because the Inu-Oh BD finally dropped. Can’t think of something more perfect for #150 than returning to Masaaki Yuasa.
And now to spend the rest of the day until 8pm on intensive gamdev 😵💫
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For the weird writing questions game: 7, 19 and 27 please? :D
7. What is your deepest joy about writing?
Ohhh, a good one. The deepest joy is in the act of it. I first thought maybe it's making people feel things, and that IS absolutely one of them, as well as having someone tell me "I feel seen by this piece of writing" (representation!) but really, it's the act of writing itself, of creating worlds and writing down what I believe to be a truth of how we work as people. I LOVE writing, and it doesn't matter of I never, like, get published again or what have you, just writing makes me deeply happy.
19. Tell me a story about your writing journey. When did you start? Why did you start? Were there bumps along the way? Where are you now and where are you going?
Oh god, well, I've been writing since I was about fifteen, so...a very long time now. I started because I realized I wanted to write after reading Anne Frank's Diary as a kid. I already loved books, deeply, but something about the fact that she wrote her diary as a young girl and was so clearly gifted, and was a Jewish girl like me...it made me want to be a writer. There have always been bumps along the way, it's impossible not to have them. I've been deeply insecure about my writing, and in some ways still am. Not everything I've written has been received well, be it fic or original writing. And where I am now: I'm writing a new novel, feeling deeply insecure about it, and still doing it. I'm hoping it may get published, but not counting on it. And I'm very much enjoying the process anyway, because that's the joy of it: telling the story itself. The rest is a bonus.
27. Who is the most stressful character you’ve ever written? Why?
Hmm. I actually don't know if I've ever found a character to be stressful to write. I genuinely can't think of anyone... Maybe when I write kids, I'm nervous because I want to be able to capture them without verging into twee and saccharine territory or making them not fit the age they're meant to be. Otherwise, honestly, I can't think of it anything!
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Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001) TV MINI SERIES 2.0
PART2
Anne Frank played by Hannah Taylor Gordon
Language: English
Won 2 Primetime Emmys
IMDb link
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books i’ve read in 2022.
the complete list of the 68 books i read this year.
i set my goal as 52 books to read in 2022 (one book per month) and i’m very happy that i achieved that! in 2021 i read 26 books, which was very impressive for me, so the fact that i’ve read more than twice that this year is incredible.
a quiet kind of thunder by sara barnard
the wife of bath by geoffrey chaucer
the diary of a young girl by anne frank
always by morris gleitzman
crooked kingdom by leigh bardugo
the spanish love deception by elena armas
the ballad of songbirds and snakes by suzanne collins
mary barton by elizabeth gaskell
do androids dream of electric sheep by philip k dick
the lonely londoners by sam selvon
the love hypothesis by ali hazelwood
it ends with us by colleen hoover
one last stop by casey mcquiston
fun home by alison bechdel
the mad women’s ball by victoria mas
ugly love by colleen hoover
twelfth night by william shakespeare
aristotle and dante discover the secrets of the universe by benjamin alire saenz
aristotle and dante dive into the waters of the world by benjamin alone saenz
they both die at the end by adam silvera
heartstopper by alice oseman
normal people by sally rooney
one day in the life of ivan denisovich by aleksandr solzhenitsyn
my policeman by bethan roberts
delilah green doesn’t care by ashley herring blake
all your perfects by colleen hoover
confess by colleen hoover
the perks of being a wallflower by stephen chbosky
one true loves by taylor jenkins reid
beach read by emiky henry
red, white, and royal blue by casey mcquiston
call me by your name by andre aciman
humans by matt haig
how to stop time by matt haig
a man called ove by fredrik backman
you and me on vacation by emily henry
find me by andre aciman
still life by sarah winman
a court of thorns and roses by sarah j maas
a court of mist and fury by sarah j maas
a court of wings and ruin by sarah j maas
a court of frost and starlight by sarah j maas
a court of silver flames by sarah j maas
book lovers by emily henry
sorcery of thorns by margaret rogerson
malibu rising by taylor jenkins reid
the poppy war by r. f. kuang
forget me twice by carina taylor
love on the brain by ali hazelwood
finding audrey by sophie kinsella
pride and prejudice by jane austen
felix ever after by kacen callender
ariadne by jennifer saint
cemetery boys by aiden thomas
the hunger games by suzanne collins
mary and the wrongs of woman by mary wollstonecraft
it happened one summer by tessa bailey
oh whistle and i’ll come to you my lad by m. r. james
a room of one’s own by virginia woolf
the strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde by robert louis stevenson
the picture of dorian gray by oscar wilde
dracula by bram stoker
silence of the lambs by thomas harris
northanger abbey by jane austen
frankenstein by mary shelley
story of your life by ted chiang
before i do by sophie cousens
heart of darkness by joseph conrad
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I did both @batmanisagatewaydrug‘s and @macrolit‘s Reading Bingos this year - was aiming for blackouts on both, didn‘t manage it for macrolit’s, but I did get a couple bingos.
Titles for each under the cut, full reading list here.
batmanisagatewaydrug:
translated book: Jonathan L. Howard: Johannes Cabal #1. Seelenfänger. [org. title: Johannes Cabal the Necromancer]
graphic novel: Vincent Burmeister, David Schraven: Unter Krähen. Aus dem Inneren der Republik. [no english title]
nonfiction: Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, Jekatyerina Dunajeva: Re-Thinking Roma Resistance throughout History: Recounting Stories of Strength and Bravery.
sequel: Luke Arnold: Fetch Phillips Archives #3. One Foot in the Fade.
poetry collection: Rainer Maria Rilke: Gedichte [herausgegeben vom Hamburger Lesehefte Verlag]
published before 2010: Faye Kellerman: Die Schwingen des Todes [org. title: Stone Kiss]
memoir: Theodor Michael: Deutsch Sein und Schwarz Dazu. Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen. [engl. title: Black German. An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century.]
oldest on TBR: Anne Frank: Tagebuch der Anne Frank. 14. Juni 1942 bis 1. August 1944. [org. title: Het Achterhuis/engl. title: The Diary of a Young Girl]
author from a different country: Alexander Wolkow: Zauberland-Reihe #1. Der Zauberer der Smaragdenstadt. [org. title: Волшебник изумрудного города/engl. title: The Wizard of the Emerald City]
romance: Iny Lorentz: Die Feuerbraut [no english title i could find]
essay collection: Scaachi Koul: One Day We‘ll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter.
fantasy: Austin Chant: Peter Darling
novella: Maria Konopnicka: Der Danziger Mendel [org. title: Mendel Gdański/no english title]
debut author: Xiran Jay Zhao: Iron Widow
ghosts or monsters: Jennifer Giesbrecht: The Monster of Elendhaven
short stories: Hendrik Buchna, Marco Sonnleitner, u.a.: Die Drei ??? und der Zeitgeist [no english title; collection of short stories in the german continuation of Robert Arthur’s Three Investigators stories]
banned book: Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
one word title: K. Ancrum: Darling
published before 2000: Josef Bor: Theresienstädter Requiem [org. title: Terezínské Rekviem/engl. title: The Terezín Requiem]
2022 release: Jonathan Kellerman: City of the Dead. An Alex Delaware Novel.
literary fiction: Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar / Jack Kerouac: On The Road (I’m pretty sure at least one of them qualifies)
YA: Jonathan Stroud: Bartimäus #1. Das Amulett von Samarkand. [org. title: The Bartimaeus Trilogy #1. The Amulet of Samarkand.]
reread: Franz Kafka: Das Urteil [engl. title: The Judgement]
400+ pages: James Ellroy: L.A. Confidential. Stadt der Teufel. [org. title: L.A. Confidential]
macrolit:
Classic Author A/B/C: -
Gothic Fiction: -
Fan Fiction: [no specific work]
published between 1960-1990: Václav Havel: Vernissage [org. title: Vernisáž/engl. title: Unveilling]
Classic Author P/Q/R: Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar
Biography or Non-Fiction: Justin Fenton: We Own This City. A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption.
Classic Author S/T/U: -
Young Adult: Christina Henry: Lost Boy
Classic Author G/H/I: -
Detective, Horror or Suspense: Tess Gerritsen: Die Chirurgin. [org. title: The Surgeon]
Philosophy or Literary Criticism: Judith Butler: Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
Classic Author M/N/O: -
Harlem Renaissance: -
Published between 1990-2022: Ocean Vuong: On Earth We‘re Briefly Gorgeous
Book of Short Stories: Don Winslow: Broken
published between 1920-1960: Jerzy Andrzejewski: Warschauer Karwoche [org. title: Wielki tydzień/engl. title: Holy Week]
Classic Author D/E/F: Leslie Feinberg: Stone Butch Blues
Children‘s Literature: [any one of the twenty Three Investigator‘s books I read this year]
Poetry or Play: Bożena Keff: Ein Stück über Mutter und Vaterland [org. title: Utwór o Matce i Ojczyźnie/engl. title: A Piece about Mother and Fatherland]
Graphic Novel: Elfriede Jelinek, Nicolas Mahler: Der fremde! störenfried der ruhe eines sommerabends der ruhe eines friedhofs. [no english title]
Classic Author J/K/L: Jack Kerouac: On The Road
Essays or Satire: Scaachi Koul: One Day We‘ll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter.
Published before 1920: Maria Konopnicka: Der Danziger Mendel [org. title: Mendel Gdański/no english title]
Classic Author V/W/X/Y/Z: Jiří Weil: Leben mit dem Stern [org. title: Život s hvězdou/engl. title: Life With A Star]
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I only just found your account so I’m not sure what books you’ve read, but here are some of my favorites:
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges
Echo by Pam Muñoz Ryan
We Are Not Free by Traci Chee
We Are Okay by Nina LaCour
thank you so much for the recommendations!! I appreciate it a lot.
I never heard some of these, but like I saw the movie goldfinch some years ago and absolutely loved it, I thought about starting the book even if I'm not sure, bc I've already read the secret history by donna tartt and it was pretty slow and boring at some point, so idk, lmk if it's too long or boring please hahaha.
also already read the diary of anne frank, in elementary school I think, it's a very important topic and I read various books about the holocaust, this one was the first ig.
alan turing!!! I absolutely love his story, ended so tragically, I inquired about his life and also saw the movie with benedict cumberbatch and he's such an interesting person, since I want to know more about him it could be an idea to read some books about him.
sorry if this is long omg
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“I live in a crazy time,” she said.
Isolated from most of the world around her, she longed for freedom, to be able to walk outside unencumbered by the hate that was slowly enveloping her world, and the fear she felt for her family’s safety.
One of the few pleasures she had during this time was to be able to peek through the windows.
One of the only windows in the attic not blacked out, she would stare at whatever patch of blue sky she could find, the birds, all framed and protected by this majestic chestnut tree that was there years before she was born and many years after her life was taken from her. She wrote about this beautiful tree, and how much happiness and hope it gave her, longing for the freedom it represented.
Long after she left this earth, a sapling from the original tree was dedicated on October 2, 2015, in Little Rock, Arkansas, surrounded by family members of Holocaust survivors, members of the Quapaw Tribe, Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II, and relatives of the Little Rock Nine.
The tree was among dozens of saplings which were propagated before the tree was weakened by disease and a windstorm in 2010.
Anne Frank loved her tree.
According to the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, Anne Frank "wrote about her own hopes and dreamed of a better future [often looking] out upon [the] large horse chestnut tree in the garden behind the Secret Annex. For her, the tree symbolized freedom as well as nature, which she longed to enjoy once again."
The Peace Page continues its special series this month, revisiting Peace Page favorites and providing updates to stories previously shared on the Peace Page.
Before her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 15-year-old schoolgirl Anne Frank and her family hid in an attic, where she wrote about her life in a diary, which was published posthumously as “The Diary of a Young Girl.”
Young Frank and her family had witnessed the horrors of Nazism, hate, and oppression firsthand, which led to The Holocaust.
She and her family witnessed the persecution of "undesirables (minorities, immigrants, homosexuals, the disabled, and the elderly). She saw neighbors, even families, divided. Racism ran rampant in this society, and opposition, any opposing opinion that spoke out for equality and for the lives of others was destroyed. Women were regarded as second-class citizens, forbidden to work, forbidden to receive an education, forbidden to speak out regarding their own lives and bodies. Patriotism was demanded for all, other religions were not tolerated. Teachers and civil servants were fired from their jobs.
According to the Washington Post, during this time, “the Nazi Party's propaganda staff became masters of negative campaigning, launching vicious assaults on the establishment parties and the ‘system’ they supported. They were convinced that details didn't matter; indeed, Nazi claims were often outright lies.”
Despite having a democratic government and a free press in the 1920s, Hitler rose to power with the support of millions of everyday citizens who voted for the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party and hailed him as a national savior in gigantic stadium rallies, according to the National World War II Museum. In Hitler’s view of the New Order, democracy would be abolished and individual rights sacrificed for the good of the führer state, creating a community of racially pure Germans loyal to their führer, who would lead them in a campaign of racial cleansing and world conquest.
In one passage in her diary, Anne Frank wrote, according to the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect:
“Terrible things are happening outside… poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”
“It’s important to remember what happened,” according to Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam. "What was done to Anne Frank was the work of human beings, and I think it's important to learn about that."
In a recent study published by the Chicago Sun-Times, today 15% of young adults believe “the Holocaust is a myth and did not happen”.
And, just this year, a memorial to Anne Frank was destroyed by vandals in a park in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
This is why the story of Anne Frank still needs to be told, why her diary needs to be read rather than banned, why her tree needs to continue to inspire hope.
Other saplings from the original tree were also sent to:
Liberty Park, in New York City, which was selected to remember the victims of 9/11 and to symbolize the hope and resilience of New York after 9/11.
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, for its “Power of Children” exhibition, which "honors Anne Frank, as well as Ryan White, the [Indiana teenager with hemophilia] expelled from school for being infected with H.I.V., and Ruby Bridges, perhaps the first black child to integrate a white elementary school in the segregated South."
The Southern Cayuga Central School District in upstate New York, which is nearby landmarks like Seneca Falls, regarded as the birthplace of the women’s rights movement.
Yvonne Simons of Anne Frank USA said the sites in the U.S. were chosen largely because they showed “the consequences of intolerance — and that includes racism, discrimination and hatred.”
Little Rock, Arkansas, was chosen because of what happened to the Little Rock Nine, black students who were jeered at and spat upon by screaming, white crowds whose contorted faces were filled with racist hate.
Leopold says Anne Frank’s story remains “relevant during the 75 years after the Second World War and . . . will remain relevant . . . Especially during ‘challenging times that we live in in 2020’ with the ‘rise of nationalism, the rise of the extreme right wing.’”
In her diary, Anne Frank described how the tree gave her hope despite her dire conditions, according to the Anne Frank Center. "We want people to come to the Anne Frank tree to reflect and have the same hope.”
Anne’s words, “I shall not remain insignificant,” are a “message to all of us to keep the painful memories of the past alive, while assuring that our dreams will remain stronger,” Leopold said.
Her trees will hopefully be a reminder of Anne Frank’s message.
“As the saplings take root, they will become living symbols of justice and tolerance in America for many years to come,” said Simons. “The message of tolerance will spread . . . across the country, joining these historical examples of hatred and discrimination with contemporary issues.”
The Jon S. Randal Peace Page
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Podcasts That Make Us Think: Why Do Some still Deny The Holocaust?
What podcast made me think this week? It's Playing Anne Frank, a new podcast released on January 24. Using archival material and interviews with surviving cast and crew members, executive editor of the Jewish weekly publication, Forward, Adam Langer presents a story that’s never been told: the backstory of "The Diary of Anne Frank," the Pulitzer Prize-winning play and Oscar-winning film, and how this iconic work shapes those involved in performing it — including high school students putting the show on today.
The Diary of a Young Girl, also known as The Diary of Anne Frank, is a book of the writings from the Dutch-language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 at the age of 16.
The podcast is notable for its timing because January 27th was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. On this annual day of commemoration, we honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism. We also promote the attributes of tolerance, collaboration, and empathy that helps to prevent future genocides.
While listening to the Playing Anne Frank podcast, I ask myself a frightening question. Could this horror happen again?
Sadly, my answer is yes.
Why do I feel that way?
First, because a recent study found that only 54 percent of the world's population has heard of the Holocaust. Ignorance, is, well, ignorance. Do you think many of the Russian people know of the atrocities committed by their army and soldiers in Ukraine? Of course, they don't. The masses are fed the line that Russia is saving Ukraine from genocide and, in a note of irony, Nazis.
Second, holocaust denialism is grown into a cottage industry, especially in the U.S. In another ironic twist, numerous studies show that present-day Germans accept and denounce the atrocities committed by the Nazis in their country. While, too many in the U.S. link the Holocaust in with the faked moon landing, JFK's assassination, 9/11, and deep state doomsday scenarios.
Holocaust denial aims to cast doubt on the facts of the Holocaust as they pertain to its Jewish victims, and for years it percolated freely across Facebook. Even though such messages have been banned by Facebook since 2021 (what took them so long?), denialism still exists in the crevasses and effluent of the social media giant.
Denial adherents claim that Jews fabricated evidence of their own genocide to gain sympathy, extract reparations from Germany and facilitate the allegedly illegal acquisition of Palestinian land for the creation of Israel.
Why has Holocaust denialism grown in this country specifically? First, it doesn't help that the ex-president of the United States has dinner with a notorious holocaust denier, Nick Fuentes. Although Trump denied knowledge of the denier. Come on. Give the man credit. He cannot be that stupid. After all, he knew Fuentes from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where hundreds of torch-bearing far-right demonstrators chanted "Jews will not replace us."
On Truth Social, owned by Trump, Holocaust denialism is a rich topic for discussion, festering on Telegram, an instant messaging site, and Gab, a social network – all known for their far-right user bases.
Trump has engaged is so many wild conspiracy theories that the truth is often obscured amid the mudslinging of wild accusations divorced from factual certitude. For example, Trump has suggested that the father of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas helped to assassinate President John F. Kennedy, and that Democrats funded the same migrant caravan traveling from Honduras to the U.S. that worried the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter.
Most Holocaust deniers want to wash away the stain of Nazism in an attempt to make Nazism an acceptable political alternative today. Many have present and past ties with hate groups and are trying to shed that image by masquerading themselves as seekers of historical truth, rather than merchants of bigotry. Holocaust denial is an important tool for anti-Semites, masquerading as a valiant search for the truth.
Second, the term “bothsidesism” has gained considerable momentum in the last few years. It describes the phenomenon of treating every opinion as equally valid, including falsehoods masquerading as objective fact. In October 2021, for example, educators in Southlake, Texas, were told if they had a book on the Holocaust in their classroom library, they would also have to have one that with an “opposing” perspective. In January 2022, Republican State Senator Scott Baldwin of Indiana said that educators “need to be impartial” while teaching students about Nazism.
In June 2022, at the American Library Association’s annual conference, author Nancy Pearl suggested that Holocaust denial books had a place in school libraries.
Other nations don't share that streak of Holocaust denialism. In 2018, Great Britain banned a prominent American Holocaust denier from entering the United Kingdom, according to a copy of correspondence from the interior ministry.
So where are we at? Seventy-eight years after U.S. soldiers found emaciated prisoners near death, mass graves, and a footprint of sadism not seen in the modern world?
There's hope, and many will not forget. Will never forget. For example, writer Alexander Verbeek recently wrote an article in Medium about Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In the article, he writes that, "The people who hid Anne Frank were breaking the law. The people who killed her were following the law."
Clearly, these Holocaust deniers need to be reminded of the tragedy of Anne Frank, her courage, and the inspiration we can draw from her ordeal.
In today's world with the January 6th insurrection, the attempt to overthrow the German government several months ago, and the recent attacks in Brazil, we need a reminder of how democracy protects us from the worst instincts of racial supremacists, extremists, and those who blame certain races and religions for their own woes.
Sadly, a conspiracy theory can provide comfort by identifying a convenient scapegoat and thereby making the world seem more straightforward and controllable.
“People can assume that if these bad guys weren’t there, then everything would be fine,” says Australian cognitive scientist Stephen Lewandowsky in a recent piece. “Whereas if you don’t believe in a conspiracy theory, then you just have to say terrible things happen randomly.”
At the end of his Medium article about the Holocaust, Verbeek writes: "Let me end with a quote from one of the other four letters that have been found, written by Zalman Gradowski, and found buried at an Auschwitz crematorium site":
"Dear finder of these notes, I have one request of you, which is, in fact, the practical objective for my writing … that my days of hell, that my hopeless tomorrow will find a purpose in the future."
Verbeek ends with: "He wrote so that his execution would find a purpose."
I think that we should never let Mr. Gradowski down.
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