by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

April 23, 2009

Combining its annual tribute with a commemoration of Anne Frank’s 80th birthday, the city of Newark paid homage to victims of the Nazi Holocaust Tuesday at the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

Acting as master of ceremonies, Mayor Cory Booker began by noting, “Adolf Hitler waged two wars — one against the nations on two continents and the other a shadow war which consumed 11 million people — six million of them Jews.”

Roman Catholic Archbishop John J. Myers followed the mayor as he spoke of Anne Frank, whose teenage diary recorded her family’s two years of hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam.

She died in 1944 at Bergen-Belsen.

“Her words of life, fear, happiness, sorrow, and hope have helped countless millions of people around the world understand the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust and how through faith, hope, and love we can triumph over evil,” said the archbishop.

Singling out a handful of survivors in the crowded sanctuary, Booker said, “They were touched by the fire of war and genocide in their youth — many of them the same age as the children who are here now.”

Taking turns at the podium, five eighth-grade students from Newark read original essays about Frank and the Holocaust.

In a poem she said was “written through the eyes of children who suffered through the Holocaust,” Khalia Peterson of Science Park High School read: “Raped of my childhood and stripped of my jubilant expression, reality hits me and permeates my depression. Why are we, the Jewish people, treated like a malady that the Aryan race despises?”

“It seems as if the world’s history is constantly repeating and many previous events we are now beginning to see,” read Laura Uzzell of Science Park High in her essay on the Holocaust.

Another Science Park student, Shatiia Burwell, read a letter she would have wanted to send to Adolf Hitler. “This mistreatment of Jews has to come to an end. It has reached the level of inappropriate and highly inhumane…. If you want this all to be solved in a peaceful ending, then stop this madness.”

Asia Lugo, an eighth-grader at St. Michael’s School, said, “Although Anne Frank only spent a short time on this earth, the impact of her life resonates for all eternity….”

The day’s featured speaker, Gajus Scheltema, had a special connection with Anne Frank and her legacy. He is Holland’s consul general in the United States, and, in Booker’s words of introduction, he “joins with us in remembering the past and in chartering a world free of genocide, free of hatred, free of bigotry.”

Scheltema spoke of Anne Frank as a “normal girl with two abnormal aspects to her. One was that she was writing a diary…. The other thing was that she was Jewish, and that suddenly became abnormal once the Netherlands was invaded by the forces of Hitler…. It is with some pride and some shame that we look back at ourselves and realize that we could have done more and didn’t do enough.”

Before offering a memorial prayer, Rabbi Clifford Kulwin of Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston said that when Anne Frank wrote her diary, “she did not intend that a group of people in Newark, NJ, 60 years later would be discussing those words, dissecting those words to understand everything we could about her and find meaning in her life. That is the gift she gave us, because by baring herself to us in this way and by sharing her story and letting us know her, we are moved by her and we understand what happened in that place so terrible and so long ago.”

The observance — the city’s 22nd Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony — was cosponsored by the Newark Archdiocese, the Newark Boys’ Chorus Foundation, the Newark Public Schools Office of Social Studies, and United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ.

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