Letter to the Editor: Lewis Regenstein

Jan Jaben-Eilon’s very interesting review of “The Betrayal of Anne Frank,” like other articles on the subject, does not mention her betrayal by so many people, even including her own father, Otto.

The team hunting hidden Jews that arrested her family on Aug. 4, 1944, was led by Austrian SS sergeant Karl Joseph Silberbauer, who was stationed in Amsterdam.

In 1963, while serving openly as a police officer in Vienna, he was exposed, suspended and brought before a hearing. There he was exonerated and reinstated after Anne’s father, motivated by feelings of forgiveness and reconciliation, shamefully testified on behalf of the Nazi who arrested the Frank family, stating that Silberbauer had “only done his duty and behaved correctly.”

Moreover, Anne’s famous quote from her diary, emphasized in the play, in books and movies, “in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” has been used and misused repeatedly to make a dubious point about human kindness.

She would never have made such a statement and could not have believed this after her and her family’s ordeals, suffering and death in German concentration camps, at the hands of so many Germans and their collaborators, who openly and enthusiastically delighted in the agony of their Jewish prisoners.

Lewis Regenstein, Atlanta