Sublime

Protecting a child from the outside world is easy, said Anne Frank as Kugel struggled to descend; his leg ached and he could only hold on, awkwardly, with his one good hand. Protecting him from his inner world, Anne Frank continued, is quite a bit more complicated.

That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.”

I opened my mouth to say, “Five.” But the number that unexpectedly and astonishingly came out instead was, “One hundred.”

she survived Auschwitz by disobeying his order to join the line with the elderly, the grey and the weak, and instead slipping into a line with younger people. She avoided the gas chambers a second time by trading food for hair dye so she wouldn’t be murdered for looking too old.

Pesia had lost her entire family when they were taken out of the bunker.