What's past is prologue

Lessons from a teenage girl in an attic

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Today—April 25—marks Liberation Day in my ancestral homeland of Italy. The anniversary of the 1945 victory of the Italian resistance movement against Nazi Germany and its puppet fascist state the Italian Socialist Republic is so important they still celebrate it as a national holiday eighty years later.

I just returned from a vacation in Amsterdam and Belgium, and it struck me how very fresh the memories of WWII are there, too. Echoes of the devastation and horror wrought by the Axis powers popped up everywhere we visited, including the beautiful city of Bruges, which was occupied by the Germans from May 1940 until it was liberated by Canadian forces in September 1944.

The Nazi's rolled Michaelangelo’s “Madonna in Bruges” in a mattress and hid it in a Red Cross truck on their way out of town in September of 1944. It was later returned by the Monuments Men. (Elisa Speranza photos)

While traveling, I re-read Ann Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, my book club’s selection this month. The words of a Jewish teenager trapped with her family in an attic in Amsterdam for over two years during World War II remain astonishingly relevant today. I hadn’t read the book since high school, and I’d forgotten that Ann, who was 13 when the family went into hiding in 1943, was a typical angst-filled teenager. She wrote in her diary (which she named Kitty) about disagreements with her mother, crushes on boys, and gossip about the girls at school. She matured as the book continued, of course, and bore witness to how conditions deteriorated as the Nazis descended on Amsterdam with genocidal fervor. It’s an astonishing work of art, as well as an important first-person narrative from a rare perspective. Throughout her ordeal, and with articulate language that belied her youth, Ann expressed gratitude for the privileges her family had—and hope for the future.

“It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals; they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Ann Frank

As the war dragged on, Ann and her family were painfully aware of what was going on, thanks to news smuggled in with their food and BBC radio broadcasts. “Terrible things are happening outside,” Ann wrote. “Poor, helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart…children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared.”

The brave people who hid the Frank family and others had the presence of mind to preserve her journals, and with them, a rare glimpse into the terror of life inside a fascist nightmare. The Diary of a Young Girl has been banned in school districts in Florida, Virginia, Texas, and elsewhere.