Tomorrow, June 12, marks what would have been Anne Frank’s birthday, making this interview and the recent planting of the Anne Frank tree all the more meaningful and poignant.

In the photo, Interim Director Joe Eggers of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota stands with Natalie Flaherty and Aga Fine, a student assistant at the Center, beside the newly planted Anne Frank tree—a powerful symbol of remembrance and hope.

Interview conducted Monday, June 3, 2025

Two weeks ago, a living tribute to history and resilience was planted in Fairmont, Minnesota: an Anne Frank Tree. Behind this remarkable project is Natalie Flaherty, an 11-year-old student whose compassion and initiative have already left a lasting mark on her community.

Earlier this week, we had the honor of sitting down with Natalie to hear more about the inspiration behind her work, the story of how the tree came to be, and the lessons she hopes others will take from it.

Getting to Know Natalie

Q: Can you tell us a little about yourself?

Natalie: My name’s Natalie and I’m going into seventh grade. I’m 11 right now and I’ll be 12 in two months. I have a bracelet mission—my bracelets say “Put a Stop to Hate.” I really like to read and write in my journal.

The Spark Behind the Project

Q: How did the idea of planting an Anne Frank Tree come to you?

We saw that Nebraska was planting one, so we traveled down there. I got to be the keynote speaker at their event. As soon as we got back, we applied right away. We filled out the forms and now we have one here—and I’m so happy that we do.

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On March 27th, Doğukan Günaydin, a master’s student at the Carlson School of Business, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While Doğukan’s detention is the result of a vague tightening of immigration enforcement, where his immigration status will ultimately be determined, the Fort Snelling Immigration Court, has been the epicenter of contentious deportations in Minnesota for more than a century and a half. 

Much of Doğukan’s arrest by ICE has been shrouded in secrecy; his name and even the rationale behind his arrest weren’t released until several days into his detainment. On April 8th, Doğukan finally appeared before a judge, appearing from the Sherbourne County Jail, one of five Minnesota counties to sign new agreements with ICE to perform certain functions related to immigration enforcement. Media outlets have suggested that Doğukan will appear before an immigration court on Friday, April 11th. 

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Your most recent book, Misrepresentation in Silence in United States History Textbooks, demonstrates the distortion of history in American textbooks. What are the implications or effects of misrepresentation?

Dr. Gellman: Misrepresentation continues to allow certain kinds of stories to be told about groups of people in ways that maintain and perpetuate dominant social hierarchies. For example, when we misrepresent White violence towards Black, Indigenous, and people of color groups, it encodes narratives of White supremacy that teach children in the K-12 system, who are encountering these narratives, that White groups are superior, that they are dominant, that they are victorious, that they should be identified with. So, it becomes an assimilation facilitator, and it demeans and undercuts the experiences and sometimes the resistances of BIPOC groups that may have worked against those actions of White supremacy. So, misrepresentation writ large has the ability to perpetuate the encoding of White supremacy in our society in ways that have many repercussions for structural justice, racial justice, and gender justice.

The other thing it does is create false justification for patterns of domination that, again, reinforce erroneous beliefs about who has what kinds of rights. So, when we misrepresent, Indigenous people, for example, as conquered, it sends a message that those people don’t count in the contemporary story. They have been conquered; therefore, they are not contemporarily relevant. Many Indigenous movements in the United States use the claim of “we are still here to assert contemporary native visibility.” Because, as I document in the book, so much misrepresentation only portrays Indigenous people in what is now the United States in the past tense as people that were here, that were dominated and have essentially disappeared.

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Prof. dr. Sarah Cramsey is the Special Chair for Central European Studies at Leiden University, an Assistant Professor of Judaism & Diaspora Studies and Director of the Austria Centre Leiden. From 2025-2030, she will be the Principal Investigator of “A Century of Care: Invisible Work and Early Childcare in central and eastern Europe, 1905-2004” or CARECENTURY, a project funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant. 

On January 27th, 2025, on the occasion of the commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of the Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Center for Austrian Studies and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota invited Dr. Sarah Cramsey to give a lecture, titled: “The Other Holocaust: Care, Children and the Jewish Catastrophe”. 

In your recent talk on January 27th, you presented the study of caretaking through three distinct case studies. Does your forthcoming book adopt a similar structure?

Yes, in my book there are three chapters that correspond to each of those three case studies – the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Soviet Union during the Second World War –, and that is the heart of the book. 

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Baby Tooth Survey Pledge Card, Missouri Encyclopedia: https://missouriencyclopedia.org/groupsorganizations/baby-tooth-survey-st-louis  

From 1959-1970, the communities of Saint Louis, Missouri were tasked with a unique mission: sending in the teeth of children to a newly formed initiative called the Baby Tooth Survey. Founded by physicians Louise and Eric Reiss, this project was in collaboration with Saint Louis University and the Washington University of Dental Medicine with the primary goal of proving the traces of radioactive contamination within children’s bodies. This radiation was caused by hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by the U.S. government in Nevada, New Mexico, and the Marshall Islands. Strontium-90, one particularly harmful radioactive isotope, was contaminating water and dairy in the United States, thereby polluting milk products being consumed by children which would be absorbed into bones and teeth. The indisputable findings of harmful radioactive levels in children documented by this initiative led President John F. Kennedy to sign the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which banned all nuclear tests except those detonated underground. This harrowing narrative led by housewives and mothers plays an important role in the history of anti-nuclear activism, which is captured by director Hideaki Ito in his documentary film Silent Fallout: Baby Teeth Speak (2023). 

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Two events clashed in the past few days: January 27, International Holocaust Memorial Day, in 2025 witnessed the commemoration of the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration and Extermination Camp. Many of the few remaining survivors came to the site of their suffering, together with many heads of state, to remember. From Germany, the President, the Chancellor, and the President of the Bundestag (the lower chamber of parliament), were present. German news magazines devoted more than half of their reporting time to covering the events directly from the murder site, where one million out of six million Jewish lives had been extinguished by an industrialized murder machine, together with some 100,000 others, many of them Poles who had dared to confront the German occupiers.

January 25, 2025: Elon Musk, high tech innovator, multi-billionaire, controller of a massive social media empire, and close confidant and advisor to the new US president Donald Trump sent a supportive video to a pre-election party gathering of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a right-wing populist party. Parts of the AfD have been categorized as radical right and anti-democratic by the German Intelligence Agencies, and a party leader was recently sentenced in criminal court for the use of Nazi language and symbols. Musk (himself with at least the appearance of a Hitler salute) expressed strong support when he told those gathered that their country placed “too much of a focus on past guilt.” Earlier, Musk had expressed praise for the AfD, and he recently engaged in a supportive conversation with its leader Alice Weidel on his platform X. 

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“Now the depression of the reactionary government.… It is a disgrace, which gets worse with every day that passes…. Everyone’s keeping their heads down, Jewry most of all and the democratic press.… What is strangest of all is how one is blind in the face of events, how no one has a clue to the real balance of power.… Will the terror be tolerated and for how long? The uncertainty of the situation affects every single thing.” So wrote Victor Klemperer in his private diary on 21 February 1933, scarcely three weeks following Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany the previous month. A literary scholar and war veteran, Klemperer watched firsthand as the pillars of free society crashed down around him. 

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On Thursday, the International Criminal Court issued warrants for senior Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and leaders of Hamas for Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes. The decision came six months after the ICC announced its intent to investigate the ongoing war in Gaza and ten months after the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel is in violation of its obligations to prevent and punish genocide.

The Center asked Melanie O’Brien, Associate Professor of International Law at the University of Western Australia, shed light on Thursday’s news and what it means for the ongoing investigations into war crimes committed in Gaza. In addition to her role at the University of Western Australia, Melanie is a Visiting Scholar at the Human Rights Center at the University of Minnesota’s Law School and was a Visiting Professor at CHGS last year.

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Charles Fodor is a Minnesota Holocaust survivor, one of the survivors whose arrival to the Twin Cities came over a decade after the end of the war. While many of the Holocaust survivors that immigrated to Minnesota did so in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, it was not uncommon for survivors to attempt to return to their prewar homes or, in the case of Charles Fodor, remain in their homes after they were liberated.

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Numerous projects in the recent past have recounted the lives of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Minnesota after World War II, with many of which telling the stories of dozens of survivors and their postwar lives in the Twin Cities. Not all survivor projects are as sweeping as these, however they are just as important.

I was able to work on one such project this summer with the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives (UMJA) in the Libraries: Jeanette Frank, born Eugenia Lewin, is a survivor of the Holocaust whose materials reside in the archives. Jeanette’s records contain extensive materials related to her time as a displaced person in the Landsberg am Lech Displaced Persons (DP) camp after the war. The collection includes vaccination records, records of employment, and, most interestingly, a scrapbook of the Yiddish theater troupe “Hazomir,” that Jeanette, (then Eugenia) was a member of during her time in the camp. Included in the records as well are later documents, including Jeanette’s United States passport and naturalization certificate.

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