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The fate of the two girls above was starkly different but both took up the

pen. Anne Frank did so in hiding and kept a diary now world famous. My

mother Georganne Robb wrote a letter to herself to be read at age 21.

Mom hid hers like the heroine of a book she’d read about. She secreted it in her

mother’s grand piano. “Dear 21” it began. She told her future self that she

hoped that the horrid Hitler wasn’t pestering the world any more.

Anne Frank’s more ambitious diary would testify to the necessity of my Mother’s

wish.

I was 11 years old when I first saw piles of dead Jewish bodies starved

and stiff with rigor mortis stacked for the ovens on grainy movie footage

that General Eisenhower made sure the world would see. I watched this with

my father on a CBS history program narrated by Walter Cronkite. Some

parents tell their children that people are filled with sin. My father let me see

that sometimes it is so.

I thought long and hard about what separated the Americans who liberated

the concentrations camps from the Germans who built them. At age eleven I

concluded that Americans and Germans were humans and that if we had

been in Germany most of us would have let Hitler happen and if Germans

had been in America most of them would have gone to war with Hitler.

Eighty years later Gazeurnica happened. I know, I know. No historical

metaphor like mashing Gaza and Guernica together is perfect. However, a

question I asked after the bombing began still stands. Which tragic deaths

were more terrible in the Holy-land, those of Israelis or those of

Palestinians? I still hew to my conviction that taking a Republican or

Democratic side is not helpful.

 This week hundreds of people attended a Duluth City Council meeting pleading for their city councilors to vote for a cease fire resolution in Gaza. Like similar resolutions in the past some councilors balked that their job was potholes not peace.

I too wish for a cease fire and object to the unfairness of the world. I also understand what it is to face angry people. I particularly recall a thousand angry parents attending a school board meeting in a school auditorium after the Tribune reported a plan to close five elementary schools. At least, like a pothole, this wasn’t something Congress was supposed to fix.  

This column was prompted by an email which was shared with me indicating that the members of Temple Israel have been badly rattled by the discussion. I’ve worked with Temple members on Habitat for Humanity projects. I joined them a few years ago in sympathy when their sister Tree of Life Temple in Pennsylvania suffered a massacre.

As in Hitler’s Germany Jewish people have come to expect accusing fingers to be pointed at them and even more so harassment and pograms. I know they feel compelled to never forget what happened to Ann Frank and six millions of their kin. And now the excesses of an Israeli Prime Minister attempting to save himself from jail by playing the part of the only man who can save his nation are causing blow back here in the US a land of promiscuous gun ownership and mass shootings.  

The email suggested that Temple Israel’s staff are now licensed to carry weapons at the urging of the Duluth Police Department. I am not Jewish and have never walked in Jewish sandals but I still trust Americans even those with whom I bitterly disagree. I liked the recent movie Rustin about the black, gay, Quaker who organized the 1963 march on Washington DC. 

The actor playing Bayard Rustin informs another character that his friend Martin Luther King Jr. kept guns in his house as did many southern blacks fearful of the KKK. King had good reason for fear. During his successful city bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, his home was bombed while his wife Coretta and infant daughter were inside. An apostle of Gandhi’s non violence Rustin advised King to get rid of his guns and King did so. I doubt that packing heat would have made King’s end in Memphis, Tennessee, any less likely. I think disarming was good advice.  

Today Donald Trump is shaming American Jews who do not support every Palestinian inciting action of Trump’s Israeli doppelganger Bibi Netanyahu. Bibi, like Trump, is fighting criminal indictment by making his fury and incompetence seem necessary.  

I could never give Trump serious consideration let alone on the the subject of American Jewery. Trump is the bastard who told America that the tiki torch bearers in Charleston, South Carolina, who chanted “The Jews will not replace us” were “good people.” Trump has Jewish grandchildren himself. Even for a sociopath like Trump this lie was a bridge too far. It was like shaking hands with Hitler under a “Arbeit macht frei” sign.  

I’ve been to the American Holocaust Museum twice most recently with my grandsons. The younger one lingered at the massive miniature mock up of a death camp with a gas chamber and tiny figures disrobing for a communal shower. I guess my Dad’s choice of history lessons has become hereditary. Seven years earlier in Israel’s Yad Vashem tears ran down my face in front of a looped movie taken in the Warsaw Ghetto under Wehrmacht administration. Two skeletal brothers the ages of my grandsons sat huddled together listless on on a curb looking for all the world like children I’ve seen in gutted Gaza hospitals.  

God bless Anne Frank and all those who suffer through no fault of their own.  

Harry read the Old Testament cover to cover after dining with Netanyahu in Jerusalem. No wonder Harry rants at lincolndemocrat.com