Anne Frank’s Message in Kalispell

The story of Anne Frank has traveled through time and space, and now the young German Jew’s experience during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam in World War II has come to Kalispell. The “Anne Frank: A History for Today” exhibit from the University of South Carolina’s Anne Frank Center is at the Wanda Hollensteiner Art Gallery at the Wachholz College Center on the campus of Flathead Valley Community College. The exhibit, which has now traveled across Montana, explores the history of the Holocaust through the experiences of Anne Frank and her family. Frank and her family became known through the posthumous publication of her diary two years after her death, at age 15, at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Nearly 80 years after the publication of “The Diary of a Young Girl,” the book continues to be one of the world’s best-known and most-read books.

I attended the opening reception for the exhibit, which is free and open to the public during the art gallery’s hours of operation. Docent-led tours are also available, so be sure to visit either the community college’s or the Wachholz College Center’s websites for more information. At the reception, Rabbi Schneur Wolf from Chabad of the Flathead Valley spoke and shared that his relatives, like Anne Frank, experienced the horrors of the Holocaust. Rabbi Wolf’s family lived in a Polish town that is now known as Auschwitz, its location and reputation forever blackened for its concentration and extermination camp where 1.1 million men, women, and children died. However, Rabbi Wolf explained that the town where his grandparents were bakers used to be Oświęcim before the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland. It used to be an ordinary town, where friends and neighbors gathered. He told the audience that his family used to hand out free bread on Friday night before Shabbat to anyone who needed food for the weekend. Then, with the rise of Nazism, everything changed. No longer is this small town in Poland remembered for anything other than its concentration camp and the pinnacle of Holocaust horrors.

Anne Frank’s diaries and Rabbi Wolf’s anecdotes about his ancestors are not bullet points from a history textbook. This exhibit and the rabbi’s words serve a much more important purpose. They remind us that the kind of poisonous and insidious hate didn’t arise out of nowhere. As Rabbi Wolf remarked, it didn’t start in the Holocaust, and it was many of his grandparents’ friends and neighbors who arrested Jews and tortured them in the camps. It started with lies big and small about a group of people, and it spread. It started with distortions of religion and culture and fueled a nation’s rise to power. It began with a slide toward authoritarian governance and the incapacity to stand up against it.

After the Holocaust, the world said never again. But those words can’t be spoken or written without intention. Without working together to dismantle hate and discrimination. Without questioning those in power who work in both blatant and concealed ways to strip others of power, to chip away at ideals and institutions that protect democracy and equality. I think a critical part of ensuring that the Holocaust doesn’t happen again is bearing witness to the words and images of those who were killed or tortured by the Nazis. To see the images of young school children in Amsterdam separated from their parents is shocking, as is listening to the relatives of Holocaust survivors talk about how their family endured this unimaginable horror. Coming together to witness a horror at once so personal and global is a significant step in defanging whatever current version of Nazism arises. Also, when we visit exhibits such as this and take the time to read about the victim’s lives, we keep the best part of those people alive. Just like Rabbi Wolf does when he tells us about the town of Oświęcim before Auschwitz. These are the vital stories we need, too.

Anne Frank’s Message in Kalispell

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