My Cousin - A Friend of Anne Frank-

This is in response to a dialog with a friend, John, where I tell him how the coronavirus, COVID-19 order to "Shelter in Place"--  meaning I should stay isolated, brought back the nightmare of Jews under the Nazi regime,  He responded with   "They locked down the senior center and the library. Then it rains for a week.  What a country.   How did Ann Frank survive 2 yrs in an attic. ??

John,

Anne had companionship; her parents and another family, including a boy a bit older with an ongoing "flirting relationship"  And then she had her diary, as she enjoyed writing, never dreaming that it would become a vivid history of one small aspect of life during those years.

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It happens that a cousin of mine knew her as a child in Amsterdam.  She is now in her mid nineties, and I have exchanged a few emails with her.  There is a movie called the The Resistance Banker based on actual events in occupied Amsterdam.  It shows a young girl who worked with the resistance movement who delivered contraband on her bike, until she was caught, and then released.  She didn't look Jewish and talked her way out of it.   She could very well be based on my Cousin. Barbara Lederman Rodbell's participation with the resistance is similar even to the use of a bike to deliver contraband to those in hiding and her arrest. 

Her story is available at this link  on three free videos from the Holocaust Museum in D.C.  She tells it from one who lived in the midst of a special variety of hatred where human beings can be transformed into a mob, that rather than restrained by law, are united by one who has become the embodiment of law, of a nation with mystical roots and a promised transcendent glorious future, that to be achieved requires the eliminating of those who do not belong.  Barbara shares talking about a love affair with a man of German roots, who so abhorred what his country had become, that he would not bring children into such a world. 

At the end Barbara said to the interviewer, you never asked about my husband who is doing important medical research; so they continued, turning the camera back on for her to say a few words about her family.  His Nobel Prize awarded shortly afterwards included a poem that conveys his research efforts in the context of the vast unimaginable complexity of the universe in a poem that is on his Wikipedia Page