Anne Frank and Me: Three Weeks and 3,600 Miles Apart

Although I had no close relatives who were victims — and it wasn’t until years later that I learned that Nazis had hanged an uncle of my wife’s by his tallis — I was obsessed by the Holocaust.

An example: as a teenager at a major-league baseball game, I’d imagine that the thousands of spectators were all Jews marked for execution. And then I’d calculate how many comparable ballpark attendance numbers added up to 6 million.

The excesses of that obsession came and went, eventually staying under control for years — until my wife and I visited Amsterdam and the Anne Frank House.

I didn’t quite know what to expect — certainly not the shocking revelation that Anne and I had been born less than three weeks apart!

You can imagine what a wave of wondering and speculation that engendered.

The inevitable questions– theological and secular– followed and wouldn’t let go.

Primarily, why was Anne a victim, while I was spared?

It certainly wasn’t because I “deserved” deliverance, and she didn’t.

 Would there be redemption in the hereafter? Let the theologians grapple with that.

Or, I wondered, was it simply an accident of geography — she, in the wrong place at the wrong time, while I was enjoying the freedom of my family’s years-earlier immigration to the United States?

Meeting a few Holocaust survivors a few years later didn’t alleviate the wondering.

Among other matters, I speculated on what it would have been like, had Anne and her family moved to Staten Island in time to avoid their destruction.

She and I might have been high school classmates, taken some of the same courses, maybe even have attended the junior prom together…

And I was sure that during, or outside of, class, it certainly would have been a pleasure to read her writings.

But I eventually faced the reality that none of this would ever be, and my Holocaust-obsession slowly dissipated, though not  completely.

Still emotionally connected to the immense tragedy, I no longer relied on faceless fans at baseball games, but on a pretty-faced Dutch girl, who, for some unfathomable reason, had traded places with me, and, by sacrificing her life, had somehow saved mine.

Joel Cohen is a New York-based freelance writer.