NATIONAL Party members who continue to question the worth of a Truth Commission should spend some time with Anne Frank. Or, more precisely, with the troops of high school pupils passing through the “Anne Frank in the World” and “Apartheid and Resistance” exhibitions at Johannesburg’s new MuseumAfrica.
A white girl says: “We need to learn from history. If we had learnt from the example of Nazi Germany, apartheid wouldn’t have happened here.”
A black girl marvels at the fact that Anne Frank is able to assert the goodness of humanity at the end of her diary, even in the face of her imminent and inevitable capture, and cries through the video of Frank’s life “not because she was Jewish” but because “she was there and she suffered, and it is something we all feel in our hearts”.
Other pupils express shock when confronted with the excesses of either Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa.
They didn’t know — and they are angry that no one bothered to tell them.
The past can be meted out as punishment (“Look what you’ve done, and now we’re going to rub your nose in it”) or elevated as propagandistic triumphalism (“Look how we suffered, and this makes us better and nobler than you”).
Neither of these abuses of history, however, seemed of concern to the kids at the Anne Frank exhibition. Rather, they — like countless adolescents all over the world before them — wanted to pull the story of Anne Frank up through the decades to talk to their current experiences; to see what it could teach them about oppression, about faith, and about survival.
And when we want to teach our children of the horrors of apartheid — and we assume that even National Party ministers do, if they are genuine in their regret — will we really be content to tell them that perpetrators kept their jobs or received large lump sum payouts to retire?
Or will we want to show them a genuine attempt to expose and deal with the past?
Anne Frank is a story of hope and courage within the horror of Nazism. The story we can one day tell — if we deal fully with the past — is our society’s triumph over a terrible history that seemed to be inexorably moving to disaster.