...I just finished watching George Stevens' (1959) Hollywood Production of "The Diary of Anne Frank", i could not help but shed a tear or two, the movie ended with Anne's statement, "despite everything, i still feel mankind is good at heart"... In the book, Diary of Anne Frank, a survivor recalled, in Belsen in 1944 Anne discovered it was different from Auschwitz, there was no organization, no roll call, no food, no water, only the barren, frozen earth and the starving people looking like ghosts. "The prisoners moved like sleep walkers, half dead, protected somehow from seeing anything, from feeling anything, but Anne had no such protection." "I can still see her standing at the door and looking down the camp street as a herd of naked gypsy girls was driven down by to the crematory, and Anne watched them go, then cried, and cried also when we marched past the Hungarian children who had already been waiting half a day in the rain in front of the gas chambers because it was not yet their turn." Anne nudged me recalls one witness, Anne saying, "Look, look at their eyes..."
My father recounted in horror to me years later, after the "Battle of the Bulge" his seeing the Nazi death camps...
By January 1945, after the fierce "Battle of the Bulge" the Allies had reached the Rhine, including my father Elmer, a U.S. army tank commander with the Allied Forces, who's "hope" was to save Anne Frank, but at Belsen typhus raged and hope of finding many survivors was dismal. Even though my mother Alexia Schneider was a Nazi sympathizer, i always discarded her opinions. Now, I often wonder if at the Nazi concentration camp in Belsen, Germany, where Anne Frank eventually met her death, I sometimes wonder if that after her seeing the "real horrors" of the Nazis in Belsen, perhaps Anne would have wanted to retract the statement she wrote in her diary several months earlier before her and her family were taken away by the Gestapo,"despite everything i still feel mankind is good at heart"... one can only wonder...?
Mark E.Temme
View Mr. Temme's "Preview Memoirs" http://marktemmecaliforniaauthor.blogspot.com/
Note: Canaan: Genesis 15:18- 17:18
"Promised by God to Abraham"
My father recounted in horror to me years later, after the "Battle of the Bulge" his seeing the Nazi death camps...
By January 1945, after the fierce "Battle of the Bulge" the Allies had reached the Rhine, including my father Elmer, a U.S. army tank commander with the Allied Forces, who's "hope" was to save Anne Frank, but at Belsen typhus raged and hope of finding many survivors was dismal. Even though my mother Alexia Schneider was a Nazi sympathizer, i always discarded her opinions. Now, I often wonder if at the Nazi concentration camp in Belsen, Germany, where Anne Frank eventually met her death, I sometimes wonder if that after her seeing the "real horrors" of the Nazis in Belsen, perhaps Anne would have wanted to retract the statement she wrote in her diary several months earlier before her and her family were taken away by the Gestapo,"despite everything i still feel mankind is good at heart"... one can only wonder...?
Mark E.Temme
View Mr. Temme's "Preview Memoirs" http://marktemmecaliforniaauthor.blogspot.com/
Note: Canaan: Genesis 15:18- 17:18
"Promised by God to Abraham"
