Last of the witnesses

Note: My weekend op-ed in the Valley City Times-Record

Update: I reworked this column to make a different point about Heroes and Heroism on the Objectiviist website The Atlasphere.

“A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic”
-Joseph Stalin

On Monday, January 11, Meip Gies died in the Dutch province of Noord-Holland, aged 100.

Among the honors Gies was awarded in her lifetime were: the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1994, and the Yad Vashem medal given by Israel to the “Righteous among Gentiles” in 1995. In 1997 she was knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

Gies, an Austrian who became Dutch, was the last survivor of five men and women who hid Edith and Otto Frank, their daughters Margot and Anne, Hermann and Auguste van Pels, their son Peter, and Fritz Pfeffer, in a secret room in an office building in Amsterdam from July 1942 to August 4, 1944. We should remember their names.

On that morning in August, the Gestapo arrested the hidden families, and two of their hiders: Victor Kugler, and Johannes Kleiman. Gies’ husband Jan was away working with the Dutch Resistance.

The arresting officers were: Austrian SS Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer, and Dutch NSB (national socialist collaborators) members Gezinus Gringhuis, Willem Grootendorst and Maarten Kuiper. We should remember their names too.

They were acting on a tip supplied by an informer who has never been identified, despite two investigations by Dutch authorities.

Kugler and Kleiman were imprisoned for various terms. Of the hidden, only Otto Frank survived the war. His daughter Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen konzentrationslager in March, 1945, aged 15, two weeks before the camp was liberated by British troops.

Gies and her friend Bep Voskuijl were questioned but not arrested. They returned to the hiding place and gathered up belongings left behind, including Anne’s diary. Gies hoped to return it to Anne after the war. Instead she gave it to Anne’s father Otto.

After Otto Frank read the diary, he told Gies, “I never knew my little Anne was so deep.”

Frank succeeded in having the diary published in 1947. Since then it has been translated into dozens of languages, and adapted into a play and a movie. It is consistently rated among the one hundred most important books of the 20th century.

Gies always refused to allow herself to be called a hero. She wrote in her book, Anne Frank Remembered, “I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did or more, much more , during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the hearts of those of us who bear witness.”

Much has been said of the heroism and goodness of ordinary people like Miep, Jan, and their friends.

Not so much has been said of the evil done by equally ordinary people. Silberbauer returned to his life as a policeman in Vienna after the war. He was briefly suspended in 1963 but reinstated after Otto Frank testified Silberbauer had obviously acted on orders and behaved correctly and without cruelty during the arrest.

Perhaps he did not know the fate awaiting those he arrested. Perhaps he never asked.
Roughly one million men served in the SS during WWII. About 70,000 of them volunteered for concentration camp duty. Only 1,700 at most, were tried after the war. Most survivors apparently went back to living normal, unremarkable lives.

Anne Frank has become the voice for the roughly 21 million victims murdered by the Nazis. Has anybody listened?

According to the University of Hawaii democide website, from the year of Anne’s death to 1987, the USSR murdered an estimated 16 million (out of 62 million total since 1917,) Communist China 76 million, North Korea 1.6 million, Poland 1.5 million, Yugoslavia 1 million, Cambodia 2 million… the list goes on.

And I wonder, where is their Miep Gies? Where is their Anne Frank?