When I was in fifth grade - ten years old - a boy in my class (a boy I spent half of my grammar school years crushing on) told me a terrible joke. I remember the joke quite clearly, and I remember not getting it.
It was in the spring of 1960, and Israel's Mossad agents had just captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, where he'd been on the Nazi down low since the end of World War II. The punchline of the odious joke, which was about Eichmann, was: if I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a kike.
I'd never heard the word "kike," so I didn't get the joke. But I knew enough about the war, and about the Holocaust (I'd read Anne Frank), to know that the joke wasn't funny. That it was off-color, nasty.
Did I say anything to Billy M when he told me the joke? Probably not. Did I pretend laugh at it? Maybe. I hope not. Did Billy M figure out I didn't get it and make fun of me for being so dense? Maybe. Maybe not. Billy M was a smart, cute, and funny kid. A little edgy, but never bullying. Not someone who was mean. Where did this joke even come from? (If I ever run into him, I'll ask. But this is highly unlikely. I missed an opportunity a few years back when one of my cousins went to her 50th high school reunion. Billy - now Bill - M was a classmate. If I'd thought of it, I'd have asked her to ask him. She did report back that he was a lawyer, and still smart, funny, and cute.)
So, a terrible joke. An unfunny joke. An anti-Semitic joke.
In 1960. Way too early for a Holocaust joke.
It's still too early.
It'll always be too early.
But someone working at a Rhode Island restaurant thinks that a Holocaust joke, meme-edition, is knee-slapping funny. So on a hot day a while back, they posted a picture of Anne Frank on the restaurant's Facebook page with this message:
“It’s hotter than an oven out there … And I should know!” The image was captioned “#ohboy.”
...The post quickly went viral. After initially dismissing concerns on Saturday, the restaurant deleted the post and then, a few days later, its entire Facebook page (Facebook has a policy against hate speech and started banning and removing posts that denied the Holocaust in 2020). (Source: Boston Globe)
No surprise that this story took off.
No surprise that the "explanations" were muddled, confused.
The owner posted it. No, some unknown worker. The manager/chef (not clear if he's also the owner) posted it, but didn't even know who Anne Frank was, blaming his ignorance on family poverty that forced him to leave school at the age of 13. It was also reported that the manager/chef thought it was funny. (Why would you think it was "funny" if you didn't know who Anne Frank was? The meme wouldn't make any sense.)
For the record: Not that there's any bottom to Nazi depravity, but - while some Jews and other victims of Nazism were thrown into burning hits, the ovens were actually used to burn the bodies of those gassed with Zyklon B. And Anne Frank did not die in a gas chamber. She died of typhus in March 1945, a few weeks before the concentration camp where she was imprisoned was liberated.
When the news of the meme went viral, people did what they always do. They jumped on Yelp to give the restaurant scathing reviews. They posted comments, some calling for the restaurant to be shuttered and the owner and/or the meme poster to be jailed. Others suggesting that people just chill.
The situation went viral: NY Post, Daily Mail, The Jerusalem Post...
I've been to Dachau. I've been to Auschwitz. I've read (and read and read) the fiction and non-fiction of the Holocaust. I've met a couple of survivors - parents of colleagues - and have seen the numbers on their forearms. I've been to the Amsterdam
I don't think jokes about the Holocaust are funny. I believe we should approach the Holocaust trembling. It's still so near, so close, so raw. So terrible that millions were massacred for their religion. Massacred by people like us, in a country not entirely unlike ours. Approach trembling.
But should this restaurant be pilloried, forced out of business, because some knucklehead who may or may not be anti-Semitic, who is more than likely an ignoramus, posted a foul meme and that someone else at the restaurant who may or may not be anti-Semitic, who is more than likely an ignoramus, thought it was funny?
The restaurant has apologized. I hope they've kicked the employee who posted the meme in the arse, explained to them why the Anne Frank meme is foul and unfunny, maybe done a bit of education about the Holocaust. If the person who posted the meme is an awful person who no one wants to work around, fire them. But maybe they're just a stupe, with the maturity of ten year old Billy M., repeating a "joke" that they may not even have understood.
Enough.
The meme was awful. Maybe all the hoopla will expose more people to awareness of Anne Frank, of the Holocaust. Which is a good thing.
I'm not racing down to Rhode Island to order scallops there, but I think it's time to give it a rest. Time to move on. Not from Anne Frank. Not from the Holocaust. But from killing this restaurant's business.
And not to be too corny about it, I'm guessing it's what Anne Frank would have wanted.
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