MY VIEW: “The Other Betrayal of Anne Frank”
(Toronto Star, January 23, 2022)
by Suzanne Berliner Weiss
The Toronto Star, our city’s daily, published on January 23 a two-page feature article called, “The Other betrayal of Anne Frank.” The article landmarks an investigation on a suspect who betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis. The betrayal of her secret annex hideout also led to the death of Anne Frank and others hidden with her in a Nazi concentration camp
In my book Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey, which tells the story of my survival, I explain that in the scramble to secure individual life, many Nazi collaborators tore the fabric of society by betraying neighbors, sowing suspicion, preying on their neighbors’ fears, and enriching themselves in a struggle for personal survival.
Surveying the views of many historians of the Holocaust, I value the writings of Primo Levi, a camp survivor, who examined the “grey zone” in the human response under total collapse of community in the extermination camps. Among those who collaborated with the Nazis, he distinguishes between guilt under coercion and voluntary criminality. There existed “grey, ambiguous persons, ready to compromise,” he wrote, and “the extreme pressures of the Lager [camp] increased their ranks.” These victims “are the rightful owners of a quota of guilt (which grows apace with their freedom of choice), and besides this they are the vectors and instruments of the system’s guilt.” Levi said that “power was sought by many among the oppressed” who “unconsciously strove to identify” with the enemy.
Even so, these collaborators remained victims and not perpetrators of the genocide. As Primo Levi noted, “To confuse murderers with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity.” (See references below)
Countless victims of Nazi genocide resolved that while they might perish, the Nazis would not destroy their souls. And wherever conditions existed for a collective response, millions of ordinary people across Europe, with Jews in the forefront, risked or sacrificed their lives to deal blows to the Nazi despotism. I owe my life to these courageous resisters.
I am convinced that values of community, solidarity, and mutuality are worth fighting for, and – yes – dying for. This lesson is not unique to the Holocaust and remains urgent in our times. But individuals are powerless to defend their societies by themselves. We must, as a world community, identify the enemy, organize, and mobilize against white supremacy and tyranny.
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(1) The Drowned and the saved, Primo Levi, Vintage Press
(2) Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi, Collier Books, Macmillan Publishing Company