A long narrow hallway showed pictures of each of the annex’s eight residents and described how and where and when they died.
The only member of his whole family who survived the war,” Lidewij told us, referring to Anne’s father, Otto.
Her voice was hushed like we were in church. “But he didn’t survive a war, not really,” Augustus said.
“He survived a genocide.” “True,” Lidewij said. “I do not know how you go on, without your family. I do not know.”
As I read about each of the seven who died, I thought of Otto Frank not being a father anymore,
left with a diary instead of a wife and two daughters.
At the end of the hallway, a huge book, bigger than a dictionary, contained the names of the 103,000 dead from the Netherlands in the Holocaust.
(Only 5,000 of the deported Dutch Jews, a wall label explained, had survived. 5,000 Otto Franks.)
The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank’s name,
but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks.
Four. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them.
I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around.
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