'What do we stand for?'

Just another hate-crime tourist attraction: Tribute to the fallen outside Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where 102 people were gunned down, 49 fatally, in 2016.

A few days before former senior Defense Department operator Chris Mellon produced the blueprint for prosecuting the U.S. Air Force and its potentially unlawful embargo of UFO data, I made a call to Pieter Kohnstam, 85, just down the road in Venice. Totally unrelated. But we hadn’t talked since I quit the paper last year. “60 Minutes” had just done a piece on Anne Frank, and how a group of cold-case investigators led by a retired FBI agent had apparently identified the man who ratted out the Franks to the Gestapo.

The alleged culprit’s name was Arnold van den Bergh, a long-dead Dutch notary who belonged to the so-called Jewish Council in Amsterdam. A book about that effort – The Betrayal of Anne Frank, by Rosemary Sullivan – had just published, and I wanted to touch base with Kohnstam. Anne Frank had been his babysitter for two years before the reckoning, nearly 80 years ago.

“You know that story has very little to do with Anne Frank,” he said in his vestigial German accent, shortly after International Holocaust Remembrance Day. “The story is about betrayal. There is no other word for it.”

For decades after the war, the Holocaust survivor had clammed up about his proximity to one of its most revered victims. That changed in 1980, when he awoke to discover swastikas painted on his car and driveway in his New Jersey neighborhood; not far away, vandals had hit his rabbi’s place as well. Kohnstam has been speaking out against intolerance, wherever he can find an audience, preferably schoolkids, ever since. He shared his story in a 2006 memoir, A Chance To Live. For their humanitarian initiatives, he and his wife Susan would receive the Legacy of Hope Award from the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect.

Kohnstam’s family, as had the Franks, fled to The Netherlands after Hitler unveiled the Third Reich in 1933. The clans were accidental neighbors when the German army rumbled through Amsterdam in 1940. She lived in an upstairs apartment, and for the next two years, Anne would keep him company, like a big sister, whenever his parents were away.

In 1942, as the Nazis began rounding up Jews for deportation, Kohnstam’s parents decided to approach the Jewish Council, established by the Reich to monitor enemies of the state. It was late Friday afternoon, the shabbat. His parents told him what happened:

“The door was slightly opened and the guy, the president, was praying facing the wall, with the candles going, he had his prayer shawl over his head. He never turned around, never said hello – all he said was ‘150,000 Swiss francs.’”

The world went sideways. The Kohnstams fled Amsterdam and beat a circuitous path for Argentina. The Frank family thought they could evade the dragnet until the war ended. Just weeks before she and her family were collared in the summer of 1944, Anne in her journal refused to surrender her spirit: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death.” She and her sister died at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Two years later, her diary was published to worldwide acclaim.

Kohnstam wanted to know if I’d been paying attention to what was happening in this country today. I said yeah. Plus, I’d just seen videos from last weekend’s American neo-nazi rallies in Orlando. Where that college kid with an Israeli flag on his bumper got pulled from his car and roughed up.

We spent a few minutes off the record.

“So are you still active writing?” he asked, changing the subject, sort of. “What are you writing?”

Given the intensity of our conversation, I hesitated for just a moment. But it wasn’t quite as awkward as it might’ve been five years ago. “Well, uh, this is gonna sound a little weird, but … mostly what I’ve been doing is blogging about UFOs.”

“You what?”

“UFOs, unidentified flying objects –”

“I understand what that is.” A drop in the temperature, a sprawling distance. Variations of what he’d seen as a child were breaking out in his adopted sanctuary, with expanded definitions of “legitimate political discourse” assuming structural proportions. This was not a time for distractions, he said. “You need to get serious about what is happening in America. We are at a crossroads.”

I couldn’t argue. Because he was right. And this was neither the time nor the place to confess that my faith in an obsolete political system had fallen so low that I’m beginning to view the UFO problem as maybe the last significant thread binding the conceptual fabric of loyal opposition. Because in our towering ignorance of the phenomenon, political divides collapse, and we are children in the dark.

Some other time or context, I might’ve attempted a clarification. I might’ve talked about how a hopeful flicker of congressional unity had just enabled a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence to issue a fearless and blistering denunciation of a “dangerously dysfunctional [Air Force] culture” that refuses to relinquish its darkest secrets. And by shielding UFO/UAP data from the citizens who’ve been footing the bill since the early Cold War, USAF actions have erased history and “raised doubts about its motives and credibility.”

Ticking off a list of no less than seven unclassified operational USAF surveillance systems that track everything that moves in our skies, and beyond, Chris Mellon had just armed lawmakers with taut questions for the Pentagon, along with leads on where those answers might be hidden. Considering how UAP could still hypothetically represent terrestrial adversaries, a push for accountability could get ugly quick.

“Against the fear of being taunted for engaging on the UAP issue,” he argued, “(military intelligence) members must now consider the potential embarrassment of looking inept and naïve for not demanding answers that might have prevented loss of life and/or a strategic reversal for the United States in its struggle with China and others.” Mellon described a “pattern of contempt for civilian oversight” behind a wall so high, it could pose “a serious test of our intellectual integrity and courage, perhaps even the ultimate test.”

Where might such a line of inquiry lead? How deep might it go, how far back? Will Congress have the attention span or the balls to stick with it when the vested interests strike back? Or will the bipartisan curiosity that boxed this bizarre realm of the black world into a corner in 2021 be in shambles a year from now?

As the 75th anniversaries of the Kenneth Arnold/Roswell milestones descend upon us this summer, we can speculate about the decisions and calculations that put us where we are today, made by those who have long since passed into history. Had they panicked back then? How did they rationalize their actions? Did they intend for this secrecy, these crimes against knowledge, to last forever? For genocide survivor Pieter Kohnstam, assigning blame is easier than passing judgement.

“One of the vilest and most invisible enemies has always been betrayal,” he said, “and I mention it in my power point presentations. What do you do? Do you sentence others to death in order to save your own neck or the lives of your family? Who is to judge that decision, who is to say? What do we stand for?”

Two different sets of stakes — one chronic, one unprecedented — set in motion long before most of us were born. Only one offers a slim chance to bend history away from repeating itself. Could the road not taken be any more horrific than the road we know all too well?