The holocaust - like yesterday's Haiti earthquake - is one of those events of untold human suffering and horror that the human brain is entirely ill equipped to process. Just beyond comprehension. Sometimes you need a doorway in, a small clue that with its own small understanding hints at the wider meaning.
I've been to the Yad Vashem Museum/memorial in Jerusalem. I've watched Schindler's List, I've seen the powerful episode of Band of Brothers when they liberate a camp. All of this - and much, much more - has been very moving, harrowing and miserable. But you always know you're still not close to understanding.
I'm still not but this news of the death of the woman who protected - or tried to - Anne Frank from the Nazis in Holland was another one of those hints. It coincided - quite serendipitously - with a screening of a dramatisation of the girl's diary I saw recently. In fact the final scene - once you've been shown how many of Miep Gies' charges did not survive (most of them!) - is Miep Gies herself finding Anne's diary after the Nazis have taken them away.
What dawned on me quite powerfully, no doubt assisted by the multiplier effect of having those dramatised images in my mind from only days before, is that what we were missing were the words from a grateful Anne Frank eulogising Ms Gies' heroism. Because the little girl was gassed along with her older sister in a chamber in Bergen-Belsen in 1945.
What we missed was her growing up in the 50s, dating boys and listening to rock and roll. We missed her getting married in the 60s, having children and watching Woodstock and the Moon Landings on TV. We missed her marching with CND in the 70s, while her children were at school. We missed the publication, celebration and no doubt Hollywood dramatisation of her subsequent novels. Perhaps a Pullitzer or even a Nobel Prize for literature. We missed her all the things she would have achieved as a famous member of the European literati, like Oprah interviews, and all manner of political, cultural and artistic endeavour we can only imagine, must only imagine. Because she was murdered at the age of 15 for being a Jew.
You can try to multiply that gap many million times over to comprehend what happened, I'm trying, but I can't. But I feel I got a little closer...