Niklas Frank has been something of an iconoclast all his life. When his siblings rose to the defence of their father, Hans Frank, the former governor-general of Nazi-controlled Poland, Niklas Frank saw him as a cowardly man who was prepared to engage in any sort of evil, if it made Adolf Hitler happy.
And when he wrote In the Shadow of the Reich, a book about growing up as the son of a Nazi war criminal, critics said he should not slam his own father in public.
They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but in the case of Niklas Frank, it landed a mile away, rolled down a hill and ended up in the next county.
Frank, a former journalist, was the keynote speaker at a Holocaust Education Week (HEW) event hosted by the Adath Israel synagogue in Toronto on Nov. 2, which was attended by 1,400 people.
In an interview with The CJN, the 78-year-old Frank said that his opposition to the Nazi regime and his parents’ role in it caused a rift between himself and three of his four siblings, as well as between him and the residents of the Bavarian town where he grew up after the war.
He recalls what led him to become a vocal critic of the Nazis, and much of it had to do with his personal feelings of abandonment and shame. (more...)
The continuing legacy of the human tragedy of Naziism -- "Never again" should be "When will it stop?"
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