Anne Frank is probably the most famous Holocaust victim, known for the diary she wrote while hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex in Amsterdam. Despite how well-known her story is, too often I see one word being used to describe what happened to her that makes my blood boil: “died.”
The official Anne Frank website notes on its timeline that she “dies from exhaustion” in 1945. Wikipedia blandly reports, “Anne Frank and her sister Margot were transferred from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (presumably of typhus) a few months later.”
Really? They died there?
Nobody simply “died” in any of the “camps.” They were murdered. Even if they weren’t gassed or their bodies weren’t stuffed into the crematoria, they were murdered. Keeping people underfed such that they die of starvation is murder. Keeping people in conditions that spread disease that leads to their death is murder. Even those who managed to escape and hide but still perished from disease or exposure were murdered. These were not passive events with no one to blame.
Anne Frank’s death was a direct result of the brutal conditions she faced in the death camps. They weren’t just “concentration” camps. Death was planned systemically, and the outcome was not accidental. It was premeditated first-degree murder.
It is not easy to use the word murder all the time. It’s personally incredibly demanding for me. It is difficult for me not to say, “My Aunt Helga died in the Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp.”
But that is not the truth. She was murdered by the Nazis. If we soften the language of atrocity and hide the harsh truth, we become desensitized to it, and we enable other people to avoid the reality of what happened then and what is happening now.
Sometimes I find myself in situations where I struggle to address the issue. Say, for instance, a doctor asks about my family medical history.
“Heart disease?”
“Cancer?”
I’m unable to answer the questions. I reply that, aside from my parents, most of my family died of unnatural causes. When that gets a quizzical look, I grit my teeth and offer brutal honesty: “I don’t know about that aspect of family history, as most of my family was murdered in the Holocaust.”
My words leave health care providers speechless. What should they say? But my anger isn’t directed at them. It’s not their fault my family’s medical history was erased, or that my family members were kept from even having a medical history that I could reference. But I am committed to using the correct language to tell the truth about what happened. It’s important.
“The so-called ‘detention’ camps in today’s news reports make it especially clear to me how important language is.”
Manipulated vocabulary is not something restricted to past events. The so-called “detention” camps in today’s news reports make it especially clear to me how important language is, how it shapes our thinking, and how it is used to conceal what is happening behind walls that keep “detainees” captive with little hope of due process or freedom.
It doesn’t stop there. I hear about “illegals” being deported (often without a valid reason), “migrant” children being separated from their parents (who may never see them again), “aliens” removed to “processing” centers, “temporary holding cells” used for months, and “segregation” (solitary confinement).
I’m hardly scratching the surface when it comes to benign-sounding words I see obscuring conditions that include overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, contaminated water and food, lack of medical treatment, disease outbreaks, harsh environments with extreme temperatures, abusive guards, no access to legal counsel or communication with families, and a rising death count.
I suppress the urge to throw up when I recall my father’s account of the savagery he faced at the Buchenwald death camp. It sounds all too similar. My nausea turns to panic as I am reminded of Hitler’s propaganda tactics that included repeating lies over and over, based on the assumption that eventually no one would remember them as lies.
I believe this applies to the language that is currently being used by some in power to purposefully shield us from the callous treatment of human life that is occurring. It is easier to refer to “detention facilities” than to prisons.
I want to shout, “Wake up! Danger! Danger! Look what is happening!” and warn everyone to watch out for this insidious language that is masking what they are doing.
But who is they? It’s another mask. It’s easy to blame ICE — does that absolve me from the inhumanity I see happening? It is my country. I am also responsible. I am not stopping them/us.
Facing the truth isn’t easy, but we have seen what happens when we avoid it.
Murder. Genocide. Extermination.
Is there any way to escape? Certainly not if we bury our heads in the sand. We must call things what they are. We must tell the truth. We must not forget or lie about the past, or we will relive it. I fear we are already headed in that direction.
Madelaine Zadik is an artist, writer and plant lover who lives in western Massachusetts. Her work has been featured on New England Public Media; was nominated for a Pushcart Prize; and has appeared in The Sun, Consequence, Mud Season Review, Zone 3, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a memoir about her relationship with her Aunt Helga, whom she never knew except through letters Helga wrote from prison in Nazi Germany. Learn more at madelainezadik.com.
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