Beyond Anne Frank

Moshe Ze'ev Flinker was born in The Hague on October 9, 1926. Moshe's father, Noah Eliezer Flinker, was originally from Poland and had become a wealthy businessman in Holland. Apart from this rather scant information, details of the family history and background remain obscure.

After the German invasion and occupation of Holland in May 1940, the Flinkers remained in The Hague, subjected to an increasing series of restrictions against Jews. Moshe wrote in his diary of being expelled from public places, being forced to wear the yellow star, and hearing news of the concentration of Jews in Amsterdam. In July 1942, the Flinkers received a deportation notice, which prompted Moshe's father to take his family into hiding in Brussels. They journeyed illegally across the border and, thanks in part to Moshe's father's wealth, they were able to obtain false identity papers to allow them to pass as non-Jews. Like their Dutch counterparts, the Belgian Jews were living under intensely repressive measures and were being routinely deported to the East. But it worked to the Flinkers' advantage that they were unknown in Brussels and were not listed on any records testifying to their Jewish ancestry.

Moshe began his diary in November 1942. His early entries read less like those of a diary and more like a treatise on the subject of the persecution of the Jews under the Nazis and its meaning in a religious Jewish context. Faced as he was with the unprecedented persecution of the Jews of Europe in his own time, Moshe endeavored to reconcile his deeply held religious beliefs with the troubling reality that surrounded him. As Moshe voiced it in the diary, "What can God intend by all these calamities that are happening to us in this terrible period?"

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