The Anne Frank of Our Times

On the morning of 4th August 1944, sometime between ten and ten-thirty, a car pulled up at 263 Prinsengracht. Several figures emerged : an SS sergeant, Karl Josef Silberbauer, in full uniform, and at least three Dutch members of the Security Police, armed but in civilian clothes. Someone must have tipped them off …

… in broad daylight, they cut across the white cab, forcing it to a halt. Wrenching open the doors, they pulled out a scared seven year-old boy, a petrified five year-old girl and a woman clutching a six month-old baby to her bosom. In the scuffle to capture the woman, the baby fell from her arms onto the road. The last memory the woman had of her baby was of him lying in a pool of blood, abandoned.

The captured woman was drugged and whisked off to a transit camp. As she gained consciousness, the air felt and smelt different. She immediately knew that she had been abducted and was now at a place far away from her home and home country. She asked for her children, but instead was given a piece of paper to sign, claiming things which she had never done. She refused to sign and consequently, she was refused her children. As a pressure tactic, she was subjugated to the screams of a child being beaten and was told that it was her son. While she was additionally mentally tortured by denying her any information about her daughter.

As four prisoners escaped the transit camp, they reported to the world about the imprisonment of a woman in a men’s prison. Not only that, they gave a harrowing account of the woman’s screams resounding through the prison cells, into the dark night. The excruciating pain in the woman’s voice made the inmates of the prison dismiss their own horrors and stage a hunger strike for the unknown woman’s agony.

The disclosure necessitated the woman to be eliminated. For this, a plan was setup to present her to the world as a suicide attacker, along with her son. However, fate had other plans. Fragile and disoriented, the woman was unable to carry out the instructions given to her by her captors, and ended up unconscious on a roadside near a mosque. She was rescued by a local guard, but only temporarily. She ended up on the media screens and craftily her captors navigated her recapture, lest she spoke too much of her journey from a mistaken, illegal abduction to a secret, torturous imprisonment.

They now needed a plan B, which conveniently happened the very next afternoon. The woman was due for ‘interrogation’ by her captors, once again. Interestingly, the woman was placed behind a curtain, unhandcuffed, in the same room where her captors gathered for a prep meeting. One of the officers, put down his loaded M4 Carbine on the floor beside his feet near the curtain. According to the captors, the superwoman jumped out from behind the curtain, picked up the M4 Carbine, and shot twice at an officer, but missed. In response, the officer shot the woman in the torso with his other pistol.

Her captors were kind enough to treat her gunshot wound, but perhaps the local doctors and hospitals were not good enough for the treatment of their captive, for they flew her two weeks later to their own country. There, after a long period of procedures and assessments, she was proclaimed fit for trial, physically and mentally. And hence started one of the most bizarre trials in the history of mankind. Apparently, the woman had been roaming around in a foreign country, along with her twelve year-old son, carrying notes, chemicals, maps and instructions to bomb another country. Had she mixed up her flights and lost the way ?

The year the woman disappeared, along with her children, there had been a global search alert for the woman. Yet, the issuers deny capturing her. Five years later, she surfaces in another country, accused of carrying bombing plans. Despite, she is not charged for terrorism. Does it make sense ?

She was, however, charged for assaulting two officers, and issued a prison sentence of eighty-six years … eighty-six years ? And what’s with the number six ? Were they trying to appear accurate ? I looked up the sentence charges against her, and it seems that they are going round in circles. For example, she is a woman, a woman she is, she is a female, she is the opposite of a male …

Let us suppose, she did assault. What about the abduction ? What about her children ? What about the torture ? What about the rape ? What about the videotape ? What about the humiliation ? Who wouldn’t assault ? Are the Geneva Convention rules one way only ? It is said that she would not cooperate with the prison staff and court ; would anyone cooperate if they were cavity-searched before an appearance ? Is snatching off a woman’s scarf part of the Women’s Rights ? Is removing a woman’s clothes, desecrating her holy book and challenging her to walk on the strewn pages to get back her clothes … ordained by the Statue of Liberty ?

After World War II, many concentration camps were liberated by the Allied Forces, although some were reached too late. Today, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui lies in FMC, Carswell, Texas, also known as the ‘House of Horrors’, with a burnt face, broken teeth and damaged hearing, a mere corpse of her original, bright and brilliant self, just like Anne Frank. Anne Frank could not be saved in 1945, but can anyone save Aafia Siddiqui in 2025 ?