Abba Kovner testifying at Eichmann's trial, Jerusalem 1961 Photo Courtesy: Israel GPO
By Zahava Rosenheim
 
The best-selling novel Fail-Safe was brought to mind with the recent news headlines about the observance of Yom HaShoah [Holocaust Remembrance Day] and that a high school in Florida removed a graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary from its library with the school administration quoted as saying it is “not age appropriate”

There is a section of Fail-Safe that talks about the story of Anne Frank and her family in a way unseen before or after in American literature.


The book was written by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. It was later made into the 1964 film of the same name by Sidney Lumet and it starred Walter Matthau as Emil Groteschele and Henry Fonda as the President of the United States. Hank Azaria played Groteschele in the 2000 television remake.

Here is the unedited excerpt-
“One of the few times that his son had seen him angry was when the subject of the Diary of Anne Frank came up. Emil Groteschele had offended the Jews of Cincinnati by arguing that Anne Frank and her family had acted like imbeciles. Rather than hiding in an attic and clutching their Jewishness to them they should have made plans to escape. Failing that, they should have been prepared to fight the Nazis when the final day came. “The steps leading up to that miserable attic should have been red with Nazi blood-and that of the Frank family,” Dr. Groteschele argued bitterly.

“If each Jew in Germany had been prepared to take one SS trooper with him before he was sent to the camps and the gas ovens, precious few Jews would have been arrested,” Emil Groteschele argued. “At some point Hitler and the SS would have stopped. Face it. If every Jew who was arrested had walked to the door with a pistol in his hand and started shooting at the local heroes, how long would the Nazis have kept it up? At around a few hundred they would have started to think twice. At a few thousand they would have started to shake a bit. If it got to twenty thousand, they would have called it off. But the first Jews who shuffled quietly off to death camps or hid like mice in attics were instruments of destruction of the rest.”

 
This call for Jews to take up arms in such a manner must have shocked readers. This was years before Rabbi Meir Kahane and his JDL made headlines for their militant attitudes and actions. 
 
In 1941, a Jewish partisan leader named Abba Kovner issued the following statement.
“Jewish youth! Do not trust those who are trying to deceive you. Hitler plans to destroy all the Jews of Europe…We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter! True, we are weak and defenseless, but the only reply to the murderer is revolt! Brothers! Better to fall as free fighters than to live by the mercy of the murderers. Arise! Arise with your last breath!”
 
The leaders of the 1943 Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto were moved Abba Kovner’s words and took up arms.
 
When Israel fought for its liberation in 1948 the entire world saw Jews using firearms for their own defense on page one of newspapers.
 
The problem now is that since Israelis have become so adept at combat too many anti-semites at the UN want to see Jews put down their guns and return to the ghettos and attics. Fortunately, we know well enough where that leads.

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