Anonymous
8/4/2025, 9:06:49 AM
No.17895438
[Report]
>>17896042
>>17896359
>>17896481
>>17897462
>>17898027
>>17899497
>Perhaps a remark on the universal success of the Diary of Anne Frank may stress how much we all wish to subscribe to this business-as-usual philosophy, and to forget that it hastens our destruction. It is an onerous task to take apart such a humane, such a moving story that arouses so much compassion for gentle Anne Frank. But I believe that the worldwide acclaim of her story cannot be explained unless we recognize our wish to forget the gas chambers and to glorify the attitude of going on with business-as-usual, even in a holocaust. While the Franks were making their preparations for going passively into hiding, thousands of other Jews in Holland and elsewhere in Europe were trying to escape to the free world, the better to be able to fight their executioners. Others who could not do so went underground—not simply to hide from the SS, (...) but to fight the Germans, and with it for humanity. (...) Little Anne, too, wanted only to go on with life as usual (...) But hers was certainly not a necessary fate, much less a heroic one; it was a senseless fate. (...) Any other course would have meant not merely giving up the beloved family life as usual, but also accepting as reality man’s inhumanity to man. (...) There is little doubt that the Franks, who were able to provide themselves with so much, could have provided themselves with a gun or two had they wished. They could have shot down at least one or two of the SS men who came for them. There was no surplus of SS men. The loss of an SS with every Jew arrested would have noticeably hindered the functioning of the police state. The fate of the Franks wouldn’t have been any different, because they all died anyway except for Anne’s father, though he hardly meant to pay for his survival with the extermination of his whole family. They could have sold their lives dearly instead of walking to their death.
-Bruno Bettelheim
-Bruno Bettelheim
