Terrible Things are Happening Outside

The Diary of Anne Frank is speaking to America. Will we listen?

Jul 05, 2025

On January 13, 1943, Anne Frank had been hiding from the Nazis for six months with her family in the secret attic of her father's business building in Amsterdam.

That day, Anne wrote in her diary about “terrible things happening outside.”

A year and a half later, on August 4, 1944, following a tip from a Nazi collaborator, the Franks were captured in their hideaway by the Gestapo and transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp in Poland.

No description available. — Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, Poland

Three months later, Anne and her older sister Margot were taken away to perform forced labor at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany.

The women's camp at Bergen-Belsen, at liberation — Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, northern Germany

Their parents, Otto and Edith Frank, were left behind at Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people lost their lives. Most were exterminated in Nazi the gas chambers; others perished from starvation, exhaustion, disease, forced labor, and medical experiments.

In January 1945, Edith Frank died in Auschwitz-Birkenau from starvation and disease.

In February, 500 miles away at Bergen-Belsen, Anne and Margot Frank died of typhus fever, an infectious disease that spreads in unsanitary conditions. More than 50,000 other prisoners also died from disease and malnutrition.

Two months later, Bergen-Belsen was liberated by British troops.

Otto Frank was the only one of the eight people hiding in the secret attic to survive the Holocaust. He was freed when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.

After the war, Otto returned to Amsterdam, where one of the helpers who had hidden the family gave him Anne's diary.

Otto decided to publish the diary, which became world-famous as ‘The Diary of a Young Girl.’

On July 3, House and Senate Republicans passed Donald Trump’s budget bill, which allocates more than $175 billion for the expansion of ICE, including the construction of additional detention centers across America.

Heavily armed, masked agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have already incarcerated more than 50,000 immigrants, the vast majority of whom have no criminal record.

A new ICE detention facility, built in just eight days in a Florida swamp, has been gleefully nicknamed ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ by the administration.

It looks eerily similar to German concentration camps, Soviet gulags, and Japanese-American internment camps built in our country during WWII.

(Please take a moment and scroll up to the image of the Auschwitz camp, then scroll back down to the image below.)

‘Alligator Alcatraz’ internment camp, Florida Everglades

As Anne Frank noted so many years ago, “terrible things are happening outside…”

“Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared."

The ‘terrible things’ are here.

Postscript:

America celebrated 249 years of independence yesterday on July 4th.

The holiday marks the day in 1776 when the Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence, which was based on principles of life, liberty, and justice for all.

Following the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which drafted a stronger framework for the government, Benjamin Franklin was leaving the Pennsylvania State House when a woman asked him what kind of government the delegates had given them.

His response was, "A republic, if you can keep it."