Anne Frank and Bosnia
Mort, Jo-Ann
There's scaffolding around the Anne Frank House on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam, the main thoroughfare in the now-trendy Jordaan section. A brochure you receive upon entering explains...
...Yet the so-called civilized world is deaf to the stories...
...Some say that Tadic is only a flunky for Karadszic, Mladic, and Milosovisc, and use that as an excuse to explain away the sparse crowds...
...What about an audience of the rest of us...
...Does Europe— or America for that matter—prefer not to acknowledge this present-day holocaust...
...I thought aboutAnne Frank spending the last month of her life in Bergen-Belsen...
...16 • DISSENT...
...Two days after visiting Amsterdam, I walked through several security guard posts to a near empty visitors' gallery to observe the trial of Dusko Tadic, a Bosnian Serb paramilitary man...
...After my visit to her house, I went back to read Anne's diary once more, trying to imagine so much life in such a confined space, so many people hidden behind the gauze of the window curtains...
...Isic appeared anxious to assist the prosecution...
...anyone could walk in on any morning, I was told...
...it stank, almost no food .. . prisoners regularly beaten, tortured, killed and disappeared . . . they started with my explaining my heritage, my forefathers, and so on . . ." From there, Isic and about fifty others were transferred to the more notorious camp, Omarska...
...More stunning than the testimony, which can be read in transcript or even watched in segments cluttered among commercials on Court TV, was the chance to observe Tadic up close: a simple peasant face, banal evil...
...Doubtless if any one of them were on trial—as they should be—the courtroom would be filled, as would the press galleries, cameras whirring, pens and computers recording the spectacle...
...to realize how profoundly small each room in the secret annex is...
...I thought about the countless Holocaust WINTER • 1997...
...I thought about the Nuremberg trials, trying to imagine a world that could learn from the experience of the Nazis and react with appropriate will...
...These are not stories recorded in sophisticated prose, the early work of a talented stylist who died in Bergen-Belsen...
...I leaned out to see lush gardens in this gentrified neighborhood with artists' studios, boutiques, secondhand bookstores, and cafes along the canal, in a part of Amsterdam that in the Franks' day was industrial—in an age when only the poor lived among industrial warehouses...
...He described an encounter when he was "directly face to face with Tadic and ordered to greet the Serbs in the Serb way: 'God be with you, heroes.' " Isic continued: "One immediately put a noose around my neck and pulled it and another dealt such a heavy blow...
...Unlike her, they have escaped death to tell it...
...Tadic said: `You'll remember Isic, you cannot look at a Serb or say anything to a Serb...
...Would more people be watching were the trial held in Bosnia...
...Probably, but that would be an audience made up of the victims...
...But so far, the United States and Europe have decided not to deliver these war criminals to the courtroom where they belong...
...I lost consciousness...
...Just twenty minutes up the road from Amsterdam, another memorial is being established, at the International UN Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia trial in the Hague Congress building...
...He didn't hesitate to talk...
...Rather, they are the simple oral tales of a daily hell...
...I fell on my stomach, they were beating me with all sorts of things...
...There were plenty of seats available in the visitors' gallery...
...I considered the streets of Amsterdam's Jewish quarter practically cleansed of Jews...
...What good is memory if we don't use it to incite action against further atrocities...
...On June 14, Serbian forces came to collect Muslim men...
...I tried to picture the lush, raw beauty of Bosnia, destroyed by warfare...
...Several of those in attendance appeared to be diplomatic or UN staff...
...Like her, the witnesses in this trial are people who have a story to tell...
...Simpson trial gavel to gavel, gives two-hour-long highlights daily...
...This construction worker moved slowly with a limp as he took his seat in the witness stand...
...Perhaps they will gain an audience, once they are packaged through the safe distance of time...
...A Bosnian Muslim witness named Hasa Isic, born in Kozarac, was testifying against Tadic, whom he had known since school days...
...Yet people were more than willing to forgo the rare summer sunshine for the darkness inside this house...
...He told the now-familiar story about how all the men over age sixteen were rounded up in buses and taken away from their town, and how others fled from the constant shelling...
...I saw a tank in front of my house and soldiers ordered men to separate from women and also boys under sixteen and took us to the truck and placed us on buses and we were taken away to Karaten [a concentration camp] and held in Room #2 until the seventh or eighth of July...
...The tourist boat stops in front of the house, one of the most popular stops on the "Museum Boat" tour...
...I kept waiting for him to react with visible horror to the events being described, but of course that wouldn't happen, since either he or his comrades committed these—and much worse—atrocities, reportedly with enthusiasm...
...Apparently, the trial has been sparsely attended all along...
...15 Comments and Opinions memorials I'd visited throughout Europe, Israel, and the United States...
...He kept tight rein on his facial expressions, occasionally managing a half-moon smile or a turn of the head in defiance...
...It is a solemn experience, to see the ink lines on the wallpaper where the Frank children's growth was measured during their twenty-five months of hiding...
...As respectful as the site is to the memory of Anne and her family, it 14 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions is after all only a site, only a memorial, and therefore somehow sanitized...
...A handful of reporters were there...
...I closed my eyes to imagine the stale and harsh smells of cooking, cigarette smoke, body odor, cat urine, and even human excrement that filled this desperate space with so many people squeezed inside of it...
...It's possible to leave the Frank house, walk over the slim bridge, and sit directly across the canal with an espresso and a newspaper—so that Anne's house becomes part of the scenery of a Sunday brunch...
...I let out a cry of pain to which the guard responded, 'He's alive, but not for long.' Other prisoners carried out the dead...
...On the day I visited, the windows were opened as they never could be forAnne...
...On the morning I was there, perhaps a dozen others—at most—were in the gallery watching behind the bulletproof glass windows...
...An article that happened to run in the Guardian while I was in the Hague pointed out that only the Guardian and a very few other European news organizations—a Dutch paper, Le Monde, Reuters—have covered the trial in a steady way, while both the Washington Post and the New York Times have covered it inconsistently, and the rest of the media have virtually ignored it...
...It was bright and clear, unlike the more typical overcast days of an Amsterdam summer...
...As I sat in the courtroom, I felt a deep consciousness of being Jewish— but this time, Jews were not the ones marked for extinction...
...When I arrived for a late morning visit on a Sunday last summer, there was already a line winding around the block, with tourists patiently queued up, waiting for forty-five minutes to squeeze into the tiny house and warehouse that hid the Frank family during the Nazi siege of Amsterdam...
...He offered several times to get up and use the pointer to show exactly where he was held or tortured— a model of the Omarska concentration camp was set up in the middle of the courtroom...
...A brochure you receive upon entering explains that the back annex needs a thorough restoration because of foot traffic from the more than half million annual visitors...
...As I leaf back through my notes, I recall the sensations that came over me in the courtroom...
...Can we only memorialize torture and death decades later...
...lying among other battered people . . . a guard entered and walked over to us to look for the dead...
...Tadic was sandwiched between two crew-cut guards, behind his court-appointed trio of lawyers...
...Anne Frank was only a typical Jew who happened to keep a diary...
...Court TV, which covered the O.J...
...He was soft-spoken but assertive...
Vol. 44 • January 1997 • No. 1
