“One day this terrible war will be over. The time will come when we will be people again, and not just Jews!” These are Anne Frank’s words, written in the year 1944. A young Jewish girl who lost her life during World War II, Anne Frank has become a symbol of hope to counter the depths to which human discrimination can sink. Nearly 70 years on, I am compelled to ask how much, really, has changed. “Terrible wars” are glossed over as wars championing democracy in one region, or as local ethnic skirmishes in another.” Belonging to a religious minority remains a weighty issue; it often evokes outright discrimination, or a sort of inept appropriation of one’s voice in the name of championing one’s rights, as with Chetan Bhagat’s recent letter written as a Muslim youth. The act of choosing one’s own partner, as with the inter-caste marriage of Divya and Ilavarasan, continues to become a violent clash between individual liberty and group identity.

As my mother described her impressions on visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the scene unfolded before my eyes and I was privy to a living ode to freedom, and to a lament about how brutally it is sometimes curtailed. When Anne Frank’s family was persecuted in Hitler’s regime, they went into hiding in a secret annexe of this very house. In a tiny space behind a deceptive bookshelf, Anne wrote a diary that she dreamed of publishing as a novel someday. A few weeks before liberation, the family was betrayed, and Anne died in Bergen-Belsen along with her mother and sister. Otto Frank, the grieving father, fulfilled Anne’s wish and published her diary, but this testament to hope in the face of tragedy touches a powerful chord even today precisely because it is plain, unadorned fact – Anne’s “novel” is all too real to brook fictionalisation. The house remains bare, preserved as it was during the time eight people lived in a tiny room. The walls carry quotes from her diary, of barely glimpsed sunlight and stolen peeks at ducks on a river. The bathroom is preserved, too. The house was occupied constantly even as the family hid in the annexe, so the bathroom was a rare privilege. “No running water, no flushing toilets, no noise whatsoever,” wrote Anne.

She told me of how the tour ended in an interactive polling session. Visitors were invited to watch one-minute videos on different kinds of discrimination – from phobia against gays to gender discrimination – and asked to vote on whether each discriminated group deserved the treatment they received. “To say no to all was easy. But sometimes, when the percentages of votes were displayed and I saw that I was a minority in the room, I felt as though I was part of a vulnerable group,” she said. When Divya, an upper caste Hindu, and Ilavarasan, a Dalit, decided to defy their communities, an entire village burned. ‘Honour’ drove Divya’s father to kill himself and ultimately resulted in Ilavarasan’s death too. The Anne Frank House may be a reminder of the mistakes of our collective past, our intolerance and hatred and our weak cries of hope. But how have we internalised that lesson?

Is history, and its relics and museums, only an act of distancing ourselves from a painful past so that we may exist in an equally bloody present? Is it naiveté to hope for a time when being “people” is more sacred than being a Jew or a Dalit?

Pavithra is a Young India Fellow in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania.

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