
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 29, 1994                   TAG: 9410130001
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BETSY BIESENBACH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ANNE FRANK

FIFTY YEARS ago, on Aug. 4, 1944, a squad of police went up to the third floor of an old house on a canal in German-occupied Amsterdam. They burst through a door concealed behind a false cabinet and found eight people huddled together in cramped quarters, awaiting their deaths.

Among these people was 15-year-old Anne Frank, whose diary would later be read by millions of people all over the world.

It seems I've known about Anne Frank all my life. When I was 8 years old, my family lived in France, and we went to visit the house she hid in. I remember the collage of film stars that decorated the wall of her room. I remember aen able to watch the final scene in the film version of her diary.

I think reading her diary is part of what inspired me to keep up my own journal, which was originally an assignment for a nine-week high-school class, but will pass its 20th birthday on Nov. 12.

I know that my diary is nowhere near being the literary masterpiece Anne Frank's is. She was a victim of one of the most horrendous events in the history of mankind. My experiences growing up in suburban, middle-class America do not compare.

And yet, when I read her entries and mine, I am amazed at the depth and range of feelings that an adolescent is capable of. So much seems to happen when one is 15, 16, 17. Why does life seem to slow down when one gets older? Why does idealism bow out and pragmatism creep in?

I often wonder what Anne's diary would have been like had she the chance to continue it. Anne dreamed of a day when Germans would no longer hate Jews, no longer persecute them or try to wipe them from the face of the earth. In fact, she dreamed of a day when people of all nations and all religions would get along.

But in the half-century that has passed, how much has changed? Hutus are killing Tutsis and Tutsis are killing Hutus by the tens of thousands. Haitians drive their countrymen to their deaths, through starvation or desperate trips across an unforgiving ocean. In Bosnia, conditions in concentration camps are said to approach those in the German death camps. And in Germany itself, neo-Nazi youths are attacking synagogues and vandalizing Buchenwald.

Here in America, some whites hate anyone who isn't like them, and many people despise them back. Some Jews hate blacks, some blacks hate Jews, and some people of every race and religion condemn gays, many of whom have their own prejudices against other groups. It's a sad fact that being discriminated against doesn't make one immune from discriminating against others.

In the face of all of this, I wonder if Anne Frank would find herself disillusioned and pessimistic in her middle age?

Historians and literary critics often bemoan Anne's early death. But I think Anne's death, as terrible and untimely as it was for her, was a gift to the rest of us. She was a prolific writer, and if she had lived, her diary would have been just one of her many works, and just one of many existing memoirs of survivors of the Holocaust.

The world will never know what it may have lost, but instead, it has been left with an example of youthful idealism that will last for centuries to come. The bright light that was Anne Frank will still be there when we are ready to open our eyes and look at it.

Betsy Biesenbach is a staff writer and free-lance paralegal in Roanoke.

by CNB