“Whoever is happy will make others happy too. He who has courage and faith will never perish in misery!” -Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank wrote this famous quote of hers between 1942-1944, in her diary or on sheets of paper, while she was in hiding with her family in Nazi occupied Germany. She was a young teenage girl, between the ages of 13 to 15 years old when she wrote it and wanted to see the world, become a writer and grow up to do great things with her life.
Things she never got to do because she was a Jewish girl, living in subjugated Germany, under Hitler’s reign of terror. This was a time and place where all Jews were to be exterminated, like cockroaches sprayed with insecticide. A horrifying nightmare, for those who harbored or helped a Jewish friend, neighbor or colleague and would be sent to the gas chambers for their indiscretions.
But young Anne, even in constant fear of being caught and taken away to a concentration camp and separated from her family, never lost hope. She knew there was good in people and wanted to believe that if you have happiness inside of you, this would spread outward to others and buoy them as well. Happiness could catch on and sustain you even in the darkest of times. You could not let fear rule you and must keep that faith, until the very end.
Because Anne was young and relatively inexperienced with worldly troubles, up to this point, she could view life in a singular lens that offered happiness and the goodness of others as a true certainty in individuals. ‘Pressing on’ despite all seems like such a noble cause, until you are actually ‘in the trenches’ and have to put your words into action. (Logos)
Anne didn’t live long enough to bring us to the ‘other side’ with her, so we have to evaluate her character on what she left behind; her writings. And the world she existed in; the museum, online tours of her actual home, her book, the continual findings of pages she has written, even more than seventy years after her death. (Ethos) www.annefrank.org.
There are two takeaways here, one is empathetic for her plight and therefore in awe of what actually occurred to not only Anne and her family but to over six million murdered Jews, not including those non-Jews. The other is that the Holocaust didn’t actually happen and therefore photos and other documents were forged. (Pathos)
However, if you were to believe the second hypothesis, you would also have to swallow quite a lot more, like all those survivors walking around with ugly number tattoos all over their arms. And the similar stories cropping up all over Germany and then spreading like wildfire after the allies went in and began disassembling Hitler’s regime and freeing those still alive in the more than one thousand concentration camps. Take a deeper dive at https://hmh.org/about/25-facts-about-holocaust/ (Kairos)
And despite all this, I feel that young Anne was onto something after all, that happiness can actually be attained and shared. That it should be embraced as a treasured gift and that no matter what our lot in life, we need to strive for courage and faith, even in the face of misery. Because dying without these attributes leaves us nothing but hollow shells, who haven’t even tried to be or do anything noteworthy in our foolishly misspent lives.
Reach for the stars, my friends!
Shosy ^_^
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