Requiat

Miep Gies died the other day at 100. There is an appreciation of her life here. She and others are responsible for bringing us Anne Frank's diary.

It probably is telling of my age cohort because we read her diary in elementary school. We also saw the film based on her diary. We know now, of course, that there was more to the diary than the version we received (a full text came out in the 1990s) but for a sixth-grader, what mattered was the story of someone our age who died at the hands of something unfathomable.

Consequently, when I lived with my cousins in the Netherlands in the summer of 1971, I bugged and bugged and bugged them to go to the Anne Frank House, 263 Prinsengrat, in Amsterdam. I did not realise it at the time but it was the first pilgrimage on which I went. Ultimately, they relented and we spent a morning there... going through the secret bookcase up into the back part of the house. There was an exhibition on human rights abuses in the house next door that forms part of the museum. At age 14, I did not really appreciate what this exhibition though I think subconsciously the seeds for my concern about this aspect of human life must have been sown.