Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl
By Anne Frank

I read this book when I was ten and cried my eyes out when I finished it. Our housekeeper, a German woman, asked what was wrong. I said, "This is so terrible—all these people," and she said, "Oh no, they are lying. Many more Germans died than Jews. Only 600,000 Jews died, not six million." It was a real wake-up call—proof that some people rewrite history—and a lesson about how we must be vigilant in remembering events like this one. In college, I wrote my thesis about racial conflict in China between Chinese and African students. And I worked on Freedom to Hate, a documentary about neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic hate groups in Russia. More recently, I was in The Grey Zone, a film about the revolt of prisoners at Auschwitz, by Tim Blake Nelson. I have to attribute my interest in crimes of hatred to this book.