No, Natalie Portman, Illegal Immigrants in the US Are Not Equatable to Anne Frank

Jul 22, 2019 by Susan Rosenbluth

By Alex Grobman, Ph.D. and Susan L. Rosenbluth

Actress Natalie Portman is the latest luminary to add her name to the pantheon of celebrities who willfully or through sheer ignorance are trivializing the Holocaust. After playing the title character in the 1997 revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, Portman evidently believes herself competent to compare Anne’s experience during the Holocaust to that of any young undocumented migrant currently in hiding in the United States because she fears being deported for being in the country illegally.

According to news reports, Portman recalled in an Instagram her visit as a 16-year-old to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam accompanied by Miep Gies, the family friend who had hidden the Franks when the Nazis were rounding up Jews in the city.

“Today I shudder at the thought of a young girl hiding somewhere in my own country, afraid to turn on her light or make a noise or play outside lest she get rounded up by our government,” wrote Portman

Specious Analogy

The analogy is nothing short of specious. Jews seized by the Nazis in the Netherlands in 1942, when the Frank family went into hiding, were usually sent to the Westerbork transit camp in northeastern Netherlands or deported directly to extermination camps, mainly Auschwitz or Sobibor. Others were deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto or Bergen-Belsen.

When the Nazis finally captured the Franks in 1944, they were sent to Westerbork and, from there, to extermination camps where all of them, except Anne’s father, Otto Frank, perished.

Portman’s hypothetical young girl hiding in the United States would not be sent to a concentration, extermination, or labor camp. She would not be starved, worked to death, shot, or murdered in a gas chamber. She would be viewed as an undocumented migrant who had crossed into the US illegally, and, like all persons who have defied the laws of the United States, she should expect to be apprehended and returned peacefully to her country of origin.

After being picked up by US officials, the young girl’s final stay in the country might not be pleasant, but her experience would not be lethal.

Finding a Place

Portman’s hypothetical young illegal migrant has a place in which she can hide. In Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, most Jews did not have that luxury. According to Elma Verhey, a Dutch investigative journalist for Vrij Nederland, finding a place to hide provided the hounded Jews the best opportunity to survive, but few Jews had that option. Many were simply too poor to pay for a hiding place.

In 1941, there were 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands. Only between 10,000 and 20,000 managed to secure a safe haven, and half of them, like the Frank family, were betrayed.

Most of the Jews in the Netherlands resided in Amsterdam, a geographical fact that exacerbated their problem. Most of their contacts were other Jews. Even if they had the funds to pay a non-Jew to protect them, where could they find one?

Atypical Hiding Place

Otto Frank was an exception. When he realized he would have to take his family into hiding, he had a number of advantages most other Jews in Amsterdam lacked. First of all, he owned the building at Prinsengracht 263, a non-Jewish area. The structure had an empty annex where products were regularly loaded and unloaded, thus arousing little suspicion.

The storage place was well equipped to accommodate eight people in relative comfort. There were bags of dried peas, potatoes, and canned vegetables in addition to a radio, various medications, and a large number of books.

Financially comfortable, Mr. Frank had a loyal staff ready to bring his family food and warn him if any problems developed. Without this support, according to Verhey, the refuge the Frank family found would have been impossible.

According to Verhey, Anne Frank lived in “relative luxury,” protected by her parents and surrounded by her books and collection of move stars’ pictures on the wall. She was able to do her homework, and the family celebrated birthdays. Although they were in hiding, the Franks managed to live comparatively normally before they were betrayed and taken by the Nazis.

Presumably, this would be the status of Portman’s undocumented migrant hiding in the United States.

Total Disruption

It certainly was not the case for other European Jews. For them, the Nazi-occupation presented a profound disruption from everything and everyone who had ever represented security.

In a personal interview, Thomas Blatt, who, at the age of 16, managed to escape from the Sobibor extermination camp during the 1943 uprising, said Anne Frank’s hiding place in Amsterdam was far nicer than his own home in Izbica, Poland, where his father had owned a liquor store.

Most Jewish children caught up in the Holocaust were hidden separately from their parents and siblings. Many were stowed away in the countryside where they were secreted with Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox-Calvinistic families or institutions, whose ways of life were completely alien to the bereft children.

Facilitating the Destruction

These were problems 13-year-old Anne Frank knew nothing about when she began writing her diary. She did not even know her fellow Dutch citizens had all but abandoned her.

As Verhey explained, most Dutch citizens were indifferent to the plight of the Jews. In fact, they can be said to have facilitated the destruction of Dutch Jewry. Of all the Nazi-occupied countries in Western Europe, the Netherlands had the highest proportion of Jewish victims.

Contrary to what Anne Frank wrote in her diary, the Dutch did not enlist in the resistance in great numbers, and very few offered to assist their Jewish friends, neighbors, or colleagues.

Dutch civil servants furnished the Nazis with the home addresses of the Jews and provided maps to help locate them.

“Each dot indicated ten Jews,” said Verhey.

Dutch policemen removed Jews from their homes by force to be deported. Dutch tram conductors transported them to Westerbork, and the Dutch Railways sent invoices to the Nazi officers to pay for the cost of adding extra trains to the transit camp.

Without the collaboration of the Dutch civil service and its administration, the extermination of more than 100,000 Jews—80 percent of the Jews living in Holland before the war—would have been impossible.

Before the Nazi Invasion

As opposed to Portman’s hypothetical undocumented migrant, Jews in the Netherlands before the Nazi invasion were not there illegally. They were either citizens or had been recognized as legal refugees. Verhey has pointed out the onerous restrictions the Dutch government placed on refugees. They had to show they could support themselves either with their own ample means or through verifiable ties to the Dutch-Jewish community, whose aid would preclude the new refugees becoming an economic burden on the Dutch state.

This is hardly the case for today’s undocumented migrants in the US. Writing earlier this year in the Washington Times, Chris Conover, an American Enterprise Institute adjunct scholar, found that “all told, Americans cross-subsidize health care for unauthorized immigrants to the tune of $18.5 billion a year.”

Anne Frank’s parents had worked very hard to ensure that their family was meeting the letter and spirit of the law, but when the Nazis came for them solely because they were Jews, none of that mattered. Portman’s undocumented migrant, on the other hand, has done everything to avoid, obstruct, and break American laws.

No Comparison

It is not surprising that Anne Frank knew nothing of the conditions that existed outside her own circumspect world. How could she? She was only 13 when she began writing and had grown up in very sheltered middle-class surroundings. Interacting with non-Jews was normal. She had no idea what had been transpiring in the Jewish neighborhoods throughout Europe during the months before she went into hiding.

Anne Frank died at the end of February or the beginning of March 1945—the exact date is unknown—in Bergen-Belsen at the age of 15.

“She died exhausted, covered with sores, apathetic with hunger, deathly sick, and without anyone to care for her. A short while before, her sister, Margot, who slept next to her on the same wooden plank and in the same barracks, had perished in the same cruel manner,” said Verhey.

For Portman or anyone else to equate Anne Frank’s experiences with that of an illegal young woman hiding from the American authorities makes a mockery of what Jewish children in the Netherlands encountered in their quest to survive the Nazi mission to destroy the Jewish people throughout the world.

Dr. Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

Susan Rosenbluth is the editor and publisher of TheJewishVoiceAndOpinion.com, an online magazine.