Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian, edited by Anthony Slide. 2014. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson

Anne Frank Trumped by the “Armenian Anne Frank”–Aurora Mardiganian

Armenian teenager Aurora Mardiganian went through the Armenian Genocide. Her horrifying experiences were not even imagined by Anne Frank. Aurora saw raping and impaling of girls (p. 10). She came across Turks cutting open the abdomens of Armenians (p. 11). She witnessed various massacres, girls sold into Turkish harems, and little children dying of starvation. (p. 51). Aurora was kidnapped by the Turks, and was forced to undergo a prolonged peregrination (map on p. 88). She witnessed a Catholic priest getting beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam. (p. 69). She saw a river literally red with blood from Armenians that had been cut by knives and swords by the Turks. (p. 98). At one time, the Turks beat Aurora Mardiganian with a whip to the point of unconsciousness. (p. 117).

In contrast to all this, Anne Frank is bland and boring. She merely sat quietly in uneventful hiding, and wrote her diary full of unremarkable personal reflections and sentiments on adolescent matters. Jewish writer Dara Horn acknowledges that, whereas most readers know that Anne Frank eventually died from genocide, her diary itself was not about genocide. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2023/06/04/holocaust-education-inequities-people-love-dead-jews-because-thats-what-holocaust-indoctrination-is-all-about-anne-frank-cliche-a-flattering-untruth-holocaust-reduced-to-a-judeocentric-morality-pl/

So why does the Diary of Anne Frank dominate the classrooms?

ANNE FRANK TRUMPED: BUT GETS MASSIVE OVER-ATTENTION

Let us now compare the poster girls of some genocides–on Google.com (January 21, 2025). “Anne Frank” gets a staggering 16,900,000 mentions. “Aurora Mardiganian” gets a mere 17,000 mentions. The best-known Polish child that died from genocidal murder–“Czeslawa Kwoka”–gets a miniscule 8,050 mentions. Is all this fair? By any rational measure, Anne Frank’s popularity is undeserved.