"Treasures From the Attic"

That's the title of the book I've been reading, by Mirjam Pressler.... it's the story of Anne Frank's family (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins)-- before, during, and after the horrors of World War II.

"The Diary of Anne Frank" was one of the first books I got from the Young Adult section of the library when I was in the seventh grade. I had started out with the Nancy Drew books, as we all did back then in the early 1960s. Then one day when I was looking through the shelves to see what else was there, Anne Frank's Diary was displayed on top of a low bookcase. I don't know what amazed me more-- that an actual diary had been published, or that its author was a young girl.

I kept a diary for years when I was a teenager, and reading the memoirs of other people has always interested me. And here I am with a long-running blog, which of course doesn't surprise me. 'Diary' is a much softer-sounding word than 'blog.'

My husband and I went to Amsterdam years ago, and we went to what is now called "The Anne Frank House." Up the stairs we went, right into the attic rooms where the Frank family was hidden away for two years. The magazine pictures of movie stars were still pasted on the wall of Anne's little room... some were faded, most were peeling away from the wall. There must have been twenty people in the tour group with us up in that attic. Not a sound from anyone as we walked through the rooms. About the only thing you heard was a zipper or a snap from a purse as someone searched for tissues. The sadness in that attic was in the walls, in the rooms, in the very air we were all breathing. Especially for the women in that little group, we were all crying as we left to walk back down the stairs to the main floor.

Before we left, I bought a copy of Anne Frank's Diary.... I have read that book so many times over the years, but I wanted a copy that came right from that very house. I read Anne's Diary on the way home on the plane, and I've read it twice since then. When I finish reading "Treasures From The Attic," I will probably read the Diary again. Some books are worth reading and re-reading over the years..... because certain things should never be forgotten.

My dad used to talk about liberating 'the camps' after The War ended in 1945. He could barely keep his voice steady when he told us about the 'walking skeletons' the Army found when they went into those camps. And there was one story about a little girl in Germany that the soldiers found wandering the streets by herself. She was lost, and had no clothes on..... my dad took his undershirt off and put it on the little girl-- I remember that he said the shirt went past her toes and looked like a night-gown on her. My dad and his unit brought the little girl from house to house, looking for someone to take her in or help her find her parents.

Over the years, my older cousins and my aunts have told me that after daddy came home from The War, he would sit in the front porch at Grandma's house and stare out the windows for the longest time. Aunt Dolly told me that a sadness followed my dad around for years, and the family tried not to talk much about the places he had been overseas. Daddy had the back of his pocketwatch engraved with the names of the countries that he went to, courtesy of the US Army-- Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Sierra Leone... there were others, but I don't remember them all. According to my Aunt Dolly... 'The war finally ended for your father when he met and married your mother, and the sadness left his eyes when you were born a year later.'

The world needs to remember its history. We're still sending soldiers off to wars.