We're headed to a small town a few hours away.

After endless traffic snarls, we turn onto a highway. The sister driving us turns up the volume of her Catholic pop tunes.

My mom, Joasia, had spent part of World War II hidden in a convent attached to an orphanage located in the town we are driving to.

At 69, Mom asked me to find the sisters who'd cared for her. I'd emailed over a dozen Catholic churches and I'd searched for months, but only met dead ends.

I was about to give up when a friend introduced me to the editor of a Polish Catholic magazine.

At his request, I asked Mom to describe the sister's clothing.

She said the nuns wore skirts and shirts, and sweaters when it was cold, and some covered their heads with scarfs -- no black or white head-to-toe habits.

The editor matched Mom's descriptions to the Imienia Jezus order.

When he reached out to them, Sister Honorata, their archivist, confirmed her order had hidden a small Jewish girl during the war.

When I met Sister Honorata at the order's headquarters yesterday, I felt hopeful.

Sister wore a polyester cream shirt, black calf-length skirt and black Birkenstock-style sandals with white socks, similar to my mother's description.

But I was still skeptical.

Whenever Mom shared her memories with me, I would research them.

Often, dates didn't line up.

Details differed.

Also, 10 years ago, she'd searched in Poland for the sisters and couldn't find them because she was looking in the wrong town.

Sister Honorata had been friends with the sister who'd cared for the little hidden girl, and who, until the day she died, worried about what happened to the child after the war.

"What was that sister's name?" My voice cracked.

"Sister Kornelia," Sister Honorata said, whispering as if someone was eavesdropping. "Joasia was always on her mind. They were more like mother and child."

Hearing her say Mom's name made my pulse gallop.

"But after the war, she was scared to talk about what happened. You could sense her fear," she told me.

This did not surprise me. Nazi Germany imposed a death penalty in Poland for anyone who aided Jewish people.

Hours later, in the car, Sister Honorata points out a small chapel painted daffodil yellow.

Greek pillars flank the front door. It's not the steepled brick building I had expected. Beside it is an enormous, single-story wooden building, large enough to be a factory. It was a school the sisters converted to an orphanage during the war — the one Mom had described to me.

I gasp. Mom has a sharp mind and excellent recall abilities. Continue reading

For me, the most meaningful experience of my time in that city was the morning that we visited the campus of Humboldt University.

That was the location of the infamous book burnings by the Nazis in 1933.

We spent a few moments at the memorial for those burnt books, meditating silently on the meaning of intellectual repression, mindful of Heinrich Heine's eerily prescient warning in 1820: "Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well."

We then moved on.

We strolled to the site of the Rosenstrasse protest.

That was where, in the winter of 1943, a group of non-Jewish women protested the arrests of their Jewish husbands. Their protests were successful; the men were released.

Then, close to that site, we encountered a sculpture — of a man sitting on a bench, blithely looking away, averting his gaze from what is going on around him.

These memories crashed into my soul this week, with the news that the Keller Independent School District school district in suburban Fort Worth, Texas, has ordered its librarians to remove a graphic novel adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank from their shelves and digital libraries, along with the Bible and dozens of other books that were challenged by parents last year.

OK, I can understand removing the Bible.

• Sons sexually violating a father.
• A patriarch sells his wife into temporary sexual slavery in order to get a few camels; that same patriarch has sexual relations with the "help" in order to father a child.
• A man offering his daughters to an unruly mob for sexual abuse
• The aforementioned patriarch almost killed his own son.
• A man having sex with his daughter-in-law, thinking that it had been a prostitute (that would be Judah. our ancestor and namesake!).
• The attempted seduction of a Hebrew man…

That's just the book of Genesis!

And, to think: For the last forty-five years, I have been earning my living teaching this text — to children!

What could I have been thinking?!?

OK, that's the Bible.

But, Anne Frank? What could possibly have been the problem?

Ah.

The graphic novel makes explicit that which readers of the original diary might have missed — that Anne had lesbian fantasies and desires.

So, for those of you who happen to live in the Keller school district, here it is:

Thursday, January 6, 1944

But I had these feelings even before my period… I remember particularly one time when I spent the night at Jacque's.

"Um…Jacque…could we show each other our breasts?"

"Why?"

"As proof of our friendship."

"Absolutely not!"

If only she had known of my terrible desire to kiss her… I must admit, every time I see a female nude, I go into ecstasy. If only I had a girlfriend!

This is an accurate re-statement of Anne's entry in the "original" diary, dated January 5, 1944; it might have been expunged in some earlier versions. This, notwithstanding her simultaneous attraction to her annex-mate, Peter.

The censorious acts of this school district in Texas offend me.

They should offend all people who believe in intellectual freedom.

Let it not be lost on us: this happened days after the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, whose books also contain "forbidden" ideas.

The actions of the would-be assassin and those of the school district only differ in intensity. The would-be assassin and the members of that school board are fellow soldiers in the war against words and ideas.

This has been the right wing's playbook all along.

This has been their strategy.

They have started small and local offices — with library boards and school boards, contenting themselves with the stifling of young minds and their imaginations.

They might have been content to see Anne Frank as one of the great tragic, moral heroines of our time.

But, that she might have been a lesbian, or bi-sexual — this was far too much for them.

News flash folks: The Nazis also vigorously persecuted homosexuals.

As for me, as a rabbi and educator of teens, I can tell you this.

Several years ago, at a different synagogue, my confirmation class read that graphic adaptation of Anne Frank's diary. They came to that passage in the text, that revealed Anne's desires.

We spent a lot of time talking about that.

The students found that aspect of her life to be not salacious, but interesting.

It made her more human.

One girl included that aspect of our learning in her confirmation speech to the congregation.

For the past sixty years, Jewish educators (and not only Jewish educators) have "used" the story of Anne Frank as a window into the teaching of the Shoah.

For Jewish kids, the story of Anne Frank contributes to their sense of Jewish pride and solidarity.

For non-Jewish kids, it is a story of heroism. Years ago, I heard a Vietnamese refugee talk about how the story of Anne Frank had given her strength when her family was in dire straits, victimized by pirates in the China Sea.

Imagine, then, how the revelation of Anne's private desires might inspire and strengthen LGBTQ kids who are looking for role models. In fact, that has been the case, as this article will make clear.

Back to that statue in Berlin.

We can choose to sit on the metaphorical park bench. We can choose to look away,

But, the other choice is a much more powerful choice — and that is the choice of activism, of screaming in the face of those who would destroy the intellectual and spiritual lives of our young people — all in the name of some imagined purity.

Yes, I said scream.

If the combined forces of anti-intellectualism, small-mindedness, and intolerance want to continue their culture war, then let's have it.

I will be in the front lines on the other side.

Oh, and another thing.

I am so done with being polite about this.

• Jeffrey K. Salkin is the spiritual leader of Temple Solel in Hollywood, Fla., and the author of numerous books on Jewish spirituality and ethics.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

Sister Cecylia Maria Roszak OP, who was aged 110, is believed to have been the oldest nun in the world.

During the war, Roszak and eight other sisters were living in Vilnius in Lithuania where they had been stationed since 1938.

Lithuania was invaded by the Nazis in 1941 and was subject to German occupation until January 1945.

During this time, Sr. Roszak and her sisters, led by their superior, Mother Bertranda, hid 17 members of the Jewish resistance in their convent, risking their lives to do so.

One of those she helped was activist and writer Abba Kovner, who later testified at the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

After the war, Israel awarded the nuns the "Righteous Among the Nations" medal, which it gave to non-Jewish people who risked their lives during the war to save Jews.

The World Holocaust Remembrance Center says the people who found refuge in the convent were members of illegal Jewish Zionist underground movements.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Times of Israel
• The Independent
• Image: The Independent

Msgr Hugh O'Flaherty disguised himself from Nazi secret police and set up safe houses in Rome between 1943 and 1944.

One of the safe houses was right next to the secret police's main headquarters in Rome.

A plaque in his honour was unveiled at the Teutonic (German College) at the Vatican on Sunday.

A commemorative Mass was celebrated at the German College.

Msgr O'Flaherty became known as the "Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican".

By using fake IDs, disguises and operating a communications network inside and outside the Vatican, he was able to outfox Nazi efforts to capture him.

The priest was able to give refuge to 6500 Jewish refugees and Allied POWs, hiding them in houses, convents and monasteries across Rome and even inside the Vatican itself.

Ironically, much of his clandestine operation was conducted from within the Vatican's German College, where Mgr O'Flaherty lived for 22 years.

Speaking at the unveiling of the plaque, Ireland ambassador Emma Madigan said the priest's compassion was not bounded by lines of nationality or religious community.

Quoting Pope Francis, she said there are people who "do not grow accustomed to evil. Who defeat it with good".

She thanked Msgr O'Flaherty, who died in 1963, on behalf of all those he saved.

"There are occasions when quite ordinary people find themselves in very dark times. When people whose great passions are golf and Kerry football, find themselves, in Joyce's phrase, in the midst of history that has become ‘a nightmare from which we are trying to awake'," the ambassador said.

"Directed and sustained by his faith, he gave up the comfort and security he had, to try and lead as many people as possible out of that nightmare."

"Happily for so many people, Mgr O'Flaherty united that faith and that compassion with apparently bottomless courage and resourcefulness. Some would put that down to his Kerry roots!"

Sources

• Premier.org.uk
• Catholic Ireland
• Image: Irish Central

Along with Bonhoeffer, six other members of the German resistance, including Hans Oster, Karl Sack, and Wilhelm Canaris, were killed by the Nazis at the Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9th, 1945.

Although seventy years have passed, Bonhoeffer's life and death continue to have deep significance for us today.

From the very beginning, Bonhoeffer was a staunch critic of Hitler and the Nazis. The day after Hitler was elected chancellor, Bonhoeffer gave a radio address in which he sharply criticized the currently fashionable and tyrannical understanding of the autonomous "Leader" (Führer).

In Hitler's rise to power, Bonhoeffer detected a dangerous connection between the will of the masses and an idolatrous concentration of power devoid of accountability and responsibility to any higher authority.

This conception of the Leader as an "office" was qualitatively different from previous ideas of divinely instituted political authority. The Leader was the expression of the individual will par excellence, and in his person vicariously represented the fulfillment of the masses.

In this way, the mass individualism manifested itself in a kind of collectivism, with the Leader acting as lord over the masses.

Among other things, argued Bonhoeffer, such an ideology ignored "the eternal law of individuality before God," which is violated when a leader "takes on superhuman responsibility, which in the end will crush him."

The basic God-given task of government is to protect and promote the freedom and vitality of other institutions of social life, not to colonize and tyrannize them.

Bonhoeffer thus opposed any totalizing ideology that attempted to subjugate all of human life and existence to political authority: "Where the state becomes the fulfillment of all spheres of human life and culture, it forfeits its true dignity, its specific authority as government." Continue reading

Sources

• The Witherspoon Institute
• Image: The Story of Liberty

At some point, however, the refugees no longer knew what to do next. Where would they be safe? How were the Nazis attempting to find them? There was no refugee center, no leadership, no organization and exasperatingly little reliable information. But what did exist was the art of improvisation and the helpfulness of many Danes, who now had a chance to prove themselves.

Members of the Danish underground movement emerged who could tell the Jews who was to be trusted. There were police officers who not only looked the other way when the refugees turned up in groups, but also warned them about Nazi checkpoints. And there were skippers who were willing to take the refugees across the Baltic Sea to Sweden in their fishing cutters, boats and sailboats.

A Small Country With a Big Heart

Denmark in October 1943 was a small country with a big heart. It had been under Nazi occupation for three-and-a-half years. And although Denmark was too small to have defended itself militarily, it also refused to be subjugated by the Nazis. The Danes negotiated a privileged status that even enabled them to retain their own government. They assessed their options realistically, but they also set limits on how far they were willing to go to cooperate with the Germans.

The small country defended its democracy, while Germany, a large, warmongering country under Hitler, was satisfied with controlling the country from afar and, from then on, viewed Denmark as a "model protectorate." That was the situation until the summer of 1943, when strikes and acts of sabotage began to cause unrest. This prompted the Germans to threaten Denmark with court martials and, in late August, to declare martial law. The Danish government resigned in protest. Continue reading

Sources

• Spiegel Online
• Image: The Jewish Daily Forward