Annexed

With political exploitation of the Holocaust entering a dynamic new phase in the cleansing actions of the Righteous State, it would doubtless be remiss to allow commercial exploitation to fall into neglect. Hence the announcement of a prequel to the diary of Anne Frank: a fiction about the two years preceding her family's going into hiding, written by an established author with the connivance of the Anne Frank House. Possibly the result will manage to avoid the Hollywood bad taste of the Schindler's List shower scene, in which a number of Auschwitz victims (including the one we're meant to care about!) are eventually sprayed with H₂O instead of Zyklon-B; but the essential bad taste is the same in both enterprises. The prequel's publishers hope it will show young readers that "contributing to a better world is both necessary and possible," presumably in a more persuasive manner than the diarist can manage on her own. Doubtless those who forced the family into hiding, and those who denounced them to the authorities, were profitably exposed to similar platitudes.