History has provided sufficient information on the sad life and ultimate death of Anne Frank, a teenage Jewish
girl hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam. Her diary has been published around the world and sold 30 million copies, so this is not an obscure book. Rarely do books sell that many copies, especially when it's an unknown, teen author. The story of Anne Frank's life and ultimate demise at the hands of the Nazis is well-known. Of that there is no doubt.
Explain to me, then, how anyone could have the cruel indifference to this girl's life and death to offer a Halloween costume as "WW2 Anne Frank costumes." The world stood up and took notice when a young prince of the British royal family wore a Nazi-themed costume to a party. Now, there has been a backlash against this extraordinarily callous bit of merchandising.
How is this seen as something to be made light of? Are we to look forward to "Crematorium Uniforms" like the one worn by the boy in "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" film for Halloween, too? Who came up with this idea? Are we going downhill into a cesspool of degradation of the lives of people tortured and killed for their religious beliefs?
I knew a family where the husband and wife were captured by the Nazis and put in a concentration camp. The wife was nine-months pregnant and the husband begged for her life to be spared; they didn't. She died there and so did her unborn child.
The resurgence of anti-semitism appears to be rearing its ugly head once again, as we've seen all over Europe and here in the USA. As people of conviction about human rights and dignity, how do we permit this? Where is our outrage? It's not just a costume, but that certainly has taken this repulsiveness to a new level. When we see the scapegoating, capturing and killing of a people as "fun", what have we become?
I hope you will speak up whenever you can regarding this. We are all on this Earth together and no one has more rights than anyone else because of their religion or the color of their skin or their place of birth or anything else.