Today's Connecting Thread Is Otto Frank.

All right, you may not recognize his name. But you likely will recognize his daughter Anne, as in Anne Frank, the diary writer and for two years with her father, mother, sister, and four others the inhabitants of the "Secret Annex", the rear extension of Otto's place of business in Amsterdam. For two years the Annex was where the eight of them hid until they were betrayed to the Nazis then occupying the Netherlands and led off to suffer the fate of every Jew and other political prisoner who opposed them. Otto was the only survivor of the eight, and he came back to Amsterdam after World War II; among other things, he's listed as co-author of The Diary of Anne Frank due to his major role in its publication and became an organizer of international youth conferences on human rights. He died in 1980, twenty years after the Secret Annex and the building it's attached to -- Prinsengracht 263 in Abraham -- became a museum now known as the Anne Frank House.


There's a lot more to Anne and Otto, and the rest of the family Frank than what you may have read in The Diary of Anne Frank or seen in the dramatic adaptation. You typically get hit with one of those in middle school -- with me it was the play, which for understandable reasons Otto could never bring himself to see -- as an example of life under the Nazis or even as a coming-of-age story. A very dark coming-of-age story, at least for Anne. Even the illustrated version that I just finished yesterday, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón's Anne Frank (ISBN 9780809026845) that's authorized by the Anne Frank House, I could not get through in a day. That's not because I've suddenly slowed down my reading rate, it's because the subject matter ... you're almost culturally expected when you hear Nazis, Holocaust, or Jews to use up your empathy reserves, never mind what's going on around you now, for what. happened. then.


Because we want to believe we'd never march people into gas chambers, or pick a class to persecute by simply making them non-citizens. Heck, I want to believe that. But I found myself this weekend getting SO ANGRY when I read Saturday morning about the latest mall shooting at a Macy's department store outside of Seattle -- five people got killed and the assailant has since been apprehended, but I remember thinking in light of a shared belief among many people who I've heard of killing others for that stated belief that if the Seattle murderer is found to share it that we ought to just kill every man, woman, and child who shares it. (Don't worry, I don't believe that right now. But it's the moments where you DO want a quick solution, a final solution to a problem when it can override your reasoning out the consequences.) At least when I throw a basketball against our garage many times, the wood isn't crying out.


But when Jeffrey called out to me that we were ready to go Saturday and I threw him the ball hard and he caught it, it wasn't pure athleticism I had in mind. It is hard to not hurt people when you are hurting, and I'm ... getting sick of not saying what I'm thinking. George Patton, one of the greatest generals of World War II -- I know, I know, some would say with me the greatest -- had a similar problem with his tongue, but especially at the height of the war in Europe he couldn't be spared for he fought and he fought and he fought and he won! Now after the Allies had taken Europe and liberated everyone they could from concentration camps -- among them fifty-five year old Otto Frank -- Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard's historical novel Killing Patton (ISBN 9780805096682) posits, Patton was a political embarrassment who with his open distrust of the Soviet Union could have torpedoed the United States and Great Britain's efforts to settle the postwar world among them and the USSR.


So one day Patton's being driven in his jeep and an Army truck runs right into it, crippling him. Granted, it's a conspiracy theory that takes up little of the book ... but it was never really investigated, why the truck or its driver were there or where they ended up. The rest of the book is really written well, with different scenes written third person ("he", "she", "it" for our audience) centering on other major figures such as Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt as well as Patton. Even people who know a bit more about World War II than either high school or the George C. Scott movie Patton (Love this movie! And the speech at the beginning where he's standing in front of an American flag, you get the full one here.) tell you will learn a lot. I know I did, and I got through this in a weekend it was so engaging for me. And at some points surprising. But now we come to my five paragraph limit, which I assume for no other reason than it's mine.


Five weeks to Nano season, David