When Nazis broke down the door and dragged Anne Frank and her family away to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, they didn't realize they had left behind a commentary on their work.
Anne Frank's diary showcases the writing skill of a thoughtful and intelligent adolescent, but it has also stood for nearly half a century as the voice of a human being in the face of institutionalized brutality.
"If she had survived, I think Anne would have jumped at the chance to apply her writing skills to inform the world about its shortcomings," says Miep Gies, who risked her life to keep Frank and her family safe from the Nazis during World War II.
Still reeling in shock from watching her friends rounded up and marched off at gunpoint, Gies had the presence of mind to look around the room where they had stayed so many months and scoop up Anne's diary before the Nazis could return and search for incriminating evidence or valuables. She hid it until the war was over, and it was published in 1947.
Now 87, Gies has spoken all over the United States and Europe on behalf of the Anne Frank Center, an international organization dedicated to tolerance. She will tell her story and urge people to help make sure that nothing like the Holocaust happens again at 7 p.m. Sunday at the First Congregational Church, 900 High Street, Santa Cruz.
Her take-home message: "Always look, under all circumstances, at other people as individuals. Never lump entire groups of people together, never stereotype them. Always judge another person only on what that person says or does."
Anne Frank and her family fled Germany in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution of Jews. The Franks were trapped in Amsterdam in 1941 and went into hiding in 1942. Gies sheltered the Frank family and several other Jews in a secret room in Amsterdam for 25 months, from 1942 to 1944. She sneaked extra food home for them, kept them up to date on what was going on in the outside world, and helped them avoid detection.
But she couldn't keep them safe forever, and her friends died in the camps of the Holocaust, along with millions of other Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and anyone else who didn't fit into or disagreed with Hitler's New World Order.
An important step in teaching tolerance, says Gies, is to make people realize that Hitler's Germany could never have happened if enough ordinary people had opposed him. Places like Los Angeles's Museum of Tolerance, which forces attendees to confront their own racism and tendencies to stereotype, could be valuable educational tools, she says.
Today's world is hardly more tolerant than Anne Frank's, Gies says, because racism and stereotyping continue. Lack of education in tolerance led to the Holocaust, she says, and more recently, fear and ignorance caused California voters to pass Proposition 187.
The law dredges up painful memories for Gies: when the Jews escaped from Germany and managed to enter Holland without visas, they were called undocumented immigrants. Authorities sent them to Westerbork, a holding camp that later became a dispatch center for sending people to the death camps. Politicians kept saying that the Jews were economic refugees who had left Germany because they could no longer make as much money as they used to and were therefore not eligible for asylum.
"I am truly scared to hear things and see actions that remind me of the '30s", she says. "The situation is different, but the indifferent and selfish attitude toward those who need help is basically the same as it was 60 years ago."
Tickets for Miep Gies's lecture are $10 in advance, or $12 at the door. There will also be a benefit dinner before the talk, for which tickets are $75. For more information, call Arnoldo Gil-Osario at 426-4541.