The Cult of Anne Frank
“The horror, the horror.” Joseph Conrad could have finished in such a way a story taking place in a kibbutz, another type of “Heart of Darkness.” I described in the past how we – high school students in a Jordan Valley kibbutz – had been brainwashed with stories about our grandparents having been made into soap. No human DNA was ever found in the infamous soap bars; it was just another scary Jewish soap opera. Another key topic in the indoctrination into constant fear was the story of a young girl named Anne Frank.
Annelies Marie “Anne” Frank was born in 1929 in Frankfurt and died in early March 1945 in Bergen Belsen. She is one of the most renowned Jewish victims of the Holocaust, due to her diaries that were discovered and published after the war with the name The Diary of a Young Girl. Over time she became an important topic in Israeli high schools, to the degree some history classes look like dedicated to a Cult of Anne Frank.
Back in 1998, shortly after my disastrous visit to Zurich, I was invited again by Dow Chemical to a conference in Amsterdam. Upon my return to Israel, everybody asked if I had visited the Anne Frank House there. Anything else was irrelevant, despite my never having had noticed the Anne Frank Altar at the office.
The repercussions to my first visit to Dow in Zurich took some time, but eventually the Israeli security services found some of my contacts with Christians. In 2002 I was put to test by the Israeli military machine. The IDF unexpectedly sent me to Bethlehem during the siege to the Nativity Basilica there. The events are described in The Cross of Bethlehem
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