“My name is Anne, she said, Anne Frank” is a book based around Anne Frank’s best friend Jacqueline van Maarsen and Anne’s life before and during the wars. It talks about what Jacqueline and her family had to go through and how the war affected Anne and Jacqueline’s friendship. Even more so than before reading this book, I now believe that what the Nazis did to the Jewish people of Europe was utterly disgusting. In the book she talks about how many of her family members were killed at the concentration camps all for being jewish, Every single member of Hijman’s family (Jacqueline’s Father) were taken to a camp to be either killed or put to work. Luckily Jacqueline’s mother was only converted to Judaism when she married Hijman so she got herself and the two girls converted back to Catholic just in time so that they didn’t need to go into hiding or be taken away.

This book has been a real eye opener for me, as I now understand what actually happened to the jews and what a hard time they had. They referred to this war in the book as the “total extermination of the Jewish race”.  I felt sorry for Jacqueline being in such a hard position, her knowing that she was safe from the Nazis but almost everyone she was friends or family with was going to be taken away to be killed or put it work. In a stereotypical world the popular girls of the school could be loosely compared to the Nazis. They do this by, if the popular girls don’t like something/someone they have ways to get rid of it because of the power and influence they hold over the population of their school. Luckily I have never experienced something like that in my high school days. But many movies these days show the social hierarchy within schools and how any girl that is deemed popular had such power over the school, that know one dared to stand up to them. They have the scare factor just like the Nazis. They didn’t like the Jewish race so they decided to get rid of them. Most people were scared of them so either kept to themselves in fear of being exterminated along with the jews or joined the Nazi force so they weren’t singled out. The Germans never expected people to be capable of such disgusting things, but I guess that is similar to the popular bullies at school. Parents don’t expect that their child could be capable of being so mean to someone that they want to end their life or make it unbearable. No one could have ever predicted that one day someone like hitler would come into power and take over everything with such ease, just like no one expects someone to be so cruel that people fear passing them in the hall ways at school. 

“The Nazi censored radio broadcasts, of course, only brought news of their own victories” Jacqueline says, telling us that the way Nazis got the world to turn a blind eye on all the awful things that they were doing to the Jews was by only advertising all the “good” or “victories” that they thought were coming from doing these unthinkable things. People then believed that what the Nazis were doing were for the best, simply because they were oblivious to the real state of affairs that were going on. The only ones that really knew the half of it were the Jews themselves.  “The bystander most likely does not want to become the bully’s next victim” this quote from http://parenting.exposed/bullying-people-turn-blind-eye/ helps support what I have been saying about bullying being like the holocaust because everyone during the time of the war either joined the Nazis or lived in fear of them. They didn’t want to see what would happen if they had tried to stand up to the Nazis and tell them that what they were doing was wrong. The way the Nazis advertised what they were doing, only showing victories is exactly how schools used to be run. The school would show off how well someone is doing in school or how good the football team is but would never publicly share that they have problems with bullying. 

I know that trying to link bullies in high school to the nazis is quite far fetched but really if you think about it they are no different. In some ways the way that bullies are in school who knows what their path in life will hold maybe this is how hitler started out. Hitler youth could be starting back up as the bullies in high schools. People died from the Nazis and people are still dying from bullies. But rather than punishing them physically, they are mentally taking them down, beating them up until they can’t even stand themselves.

Bullies are modern day Nazis.

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