In my classroom I have a picture of Anne Frank. She is sitting at a classroom desk and smiling into the camera. On my own desk is the Press Herald, and I’m reading a letter to the editor by Penny Conti (Feb. 10, Page A6), stating that she stands with “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg’s comments about race and the Holocaust. Goldberg, by the way, later retracted her statement, so Conti is standing alone on rhetorical rubble that Goldberg built and later demolished.

Children in striped uniforms stand behind barbed wire fencing during the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, in Poland, by Russian soldiers in April 1945. Associated Press, File

The Nazis’ Final Solution was based on a scientifically flawed understanding of race. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia has said: “With the patina of legitimacy provided by ‘racial’ science experts, the Nazi regime … found its most radical manifestation in the death of millions of ‘racial’ enemies in the Holocaust.”

Anne Frank’s remarkable voice was silenced in the Bergen-Belsen extermination camp in 1945. She died because hateful people believed they were members of the Nazi Aryan race and invented a pseudoscience to give them an excuse to say that Anne Frank was a member of an inferior race.

For further study, I encourage anyone to look at Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Race Laws, enacted in 1935. These race laws denied German Jews rights of citizenship and annulled and outlawed marriage between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans for fear of polluting non-Jewish German blood.

Anne Frank wrote that “What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it from happening again.” We prevent another Holocaust from happening by remembering, not falsifying, what the first one was about.

Gregory Greenleaf
Harpswell