Huntington readies for annual celebration of memorial garden honoring Anne Frank's legacy

Anne Frank’s belief in the goodness of humanity is timeless, and is once again being honored in an annual celebration in Huntington Town.

Holocaust education advocate Gail Sheryn Kastenholz said keeping that message in the forefront can be a challenge.

“It’s about the importance of education and people knowing history,” said Kastenholz, a volunteer with the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County, in Glen Cove. “With what’s going on in Ukraine today, if you don’t know history, you don’t understand how this is happening again and how it’s history repeating itself.”

Kastenholz, who lives in Huntington Station, will be the featured speaker on June 22 at the Town of Huntington’s yearly celebration of the Anne Frank Memorial Garden in Melville.

Frank’s diary, written while she and her family hid from the Nazis during World War II, is renowned for its messages of hope despite dire circumstances and the belief that people are ultimately good. Frank and her parents and older sister were discovered and sent to concentration camps in Germany. She died of typhus in 1945, at the age of 15, at Bergen-Belsen, not long before British troops liberated it. Only her father, Otto, survived the war.

Town officials said the Memorial Garden serves as a tribute to Frank’s legacy of belief in the goodness of human nature, despite the ugliness of war and discrimination.   

“The memorial is a perpetual reminder of tolerance and understanding for all members of our community,” said Town Supervisor Ed Smyth. “Huntington is a diverse community, and it’s important that we have a memorial in our community to illustrate that and to remind everyone of the importance of understanding.”

The idea for the garden was led by former town board member Marlene Budd and later by Susan Berland, also a former town board member who also was a majority leader of the Suffolk County Legislature. It was unveiled in 2010.

“The essence and meaning of the garden is as relevant today as the day we unveiled it,” Berland said. “As Anne wrote, ‘How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.’ Let’s not wait a moment more.”

Kastenholz’s parents went into hiding in Poland, she said, were eventually placed in a displaced person’s camp and went on to live fulfilling lives. She said that resilience to continue life is also a tribute to Frank’s legacy.

“It’s important to understand that there was a lot of loss but also a desire to start life again,” Kastenholz said. “That if you survive you have the fortitude and strength to rebuild your life.”  

Rabbi Beth Klafter of Temple Beth David in Commack, also a participant in the program, said even though there is a lot of darkness in the world, “we can learn a lesson from Anne Frank, which is to try to find the glimmer of sunlight that she could perhaps see even when she was in hiding.”

Rabbi Yakov Saacks, of The Chai Center in Dix Hills, said Frank’s innocence and why she died is one of the louder messages that should be remembered and never repeated.

“She was taken down strictly because of a bias; she wasn’t a soldier or a fighter or a warrior; she didn’t have a gun,” Saacks said. “This is how perversions to mankind occur, when you have a bias to the point that it’s not rational.”