![]() ![]() ![]() “When I write,” she confided, “I can shake off all my cares. Yet any projection of Anne Frank as a contemporary figure is an unholy speculation: it tampers with history, with reality, with deadly truth. Het Achterhuis, as she called her manuscript, in Dutch-“the house behind,” often translated as “the secret annex”-was hardly intended to be Anne Frank’s last word it was conceived as the forerunner work of a professional woman of letters. In her last months, she was assiduously polishing phrases and editing passages with an eye to postwar publication. She had already intuited what greatness in literature might mean, and she clearly sensed the force of what lay under her hand in the pages of her diary: a conscious literary record of frightened lives in daily peril an explosive document aimed directly at the future. This was more than an exaggerated adolescent flourish. “I want to go on living even after my death!” she exclaimed in the spring of 1944. As an international literary presence, she would be thick rather than thin. We can be certain (as certain as one can be of anything hypothetical) that her mature prose would today be noted for its wit and acuity, and almost as certain that the trajectory of her work would be closer to that of Nadine Gordimer, say, than to that of Francoise Sagan. ![]() It is easy to imagine-had she been allowed to live-a long row of novels and essays spilling from her fluent and ripening pen. At thirteen, she felt her power at fifteen, she was in command of it. And even if she had not kept the extraordinary diary through which we know her it is likely that we would number her among the famous of this century-though perhaps not so dramatically as we do now. He limited his attacks on the Jewish state to conventional weapons.If Anne Frank had not perished in the criminal malevolence of Bergen-Belsen early in 1945, she would have marked her sixty-eighth birthday last June. The Iraqi dictator had deployed chemical weapons against his own country’s Kurds three years earlier. ![]() Gas masks were first distributed and used widely in Israel when the Saddam Hussein fired SCUD missiles at Tel Aviv during the First Gulf War. He told the Hebrew edition of Yedioth Ahronoth that while he “pray to God to protect the Nation of Israel,” he believes that “to pray without taking a mask is like buying a lottery ticket without buying a ticket.”Īll told, the Israel Postal Service has thus far distributed at least 4.8 million gas masks, accounting for six in ten Israelis. In the capital’s Shmuel Hanavi neighborhood, a member of the Sanz Hasidic community picked up nine gas masks for his large family. In Jerusalem the number is just 30 percent. Sixty-two percent of Tel Aviv residents are already equipped with the masks, compared to three-quarters in Israel’s northernmost city Kiryat Shmona. The Israel Postal Company, which provides the masks through a call-in service, has registered a fourfold rise in gas masks requests nationwide. Syria has one of the world’s largest chemical-weapons arsenals, containing roughly 1,000 tons of nerve agents. Israelis are rushing to equip themselves and their families with gas masks, amid an escalation in the Syrian crisis and the widely suspected use of chemical weapons by the Bashar al-Assad regime. ![]()
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