The Mat Fritzlinger Story

• The angry young man--Mat Fritzlinger is a young man not unlike other young people today. He is angry, and he chooses to express his anger with hatred. What is he angry about? We can only guess--injustice, the unfairness of life, the way he's been treated or criticized. Regardless, his anger has caused him to accept a heinous philosophy of bigotry. He believes that people of specific cultures or races are the cause of the world's problems. He believes that some races or cultures are better than others. He believes that great tragedies such as the Holocaust, the slaughter of millions of people by the Nazis during WWII, never happened--that it's all a conspiracy to rewrite history.

• Choices--Mat starts out on a school tour to the Museum of Tolerance of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He separates from the group and encounters exhibits from the Holocaust and other human tragedies. With a can of black spray paint, he defaces the exhibits.

• The library--As he proceeds, Mat passes through an entry and finds himself in a library with a very interesting librarian. Libraries are places of imagination and travel, and suddenly Mat finds himself transported to Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, in the midst of a hunt for Jewish saboteurs. It is WWII, and he is one of the Jews with a yellow star on his breast. Mat had been looking at the Holocaust from a distance: now he is in it. He had been one of the haters: now he is one of the hated.

• The hiding place--Mat finds sanctuary for the moment with a family in a secret apartment. A young girl named Anne--the Anne Frank of literary fame--has beckoned him off the street as the Nazi soldiers are about to find him. He spends some time with Anne and her family and begins to understand how hatred destroys lives and dreams. But the change is not an easy one. Before the transition is complete, Mat makes some choices with very severe consequences.

• Fantasy vs. reality--Mat Fritzlinger is a fictional character. He never existed, but there are Mat Fritzlinger's in our world today, and there is some of Mat's hatred in many, many people. The story in the video is a fictional rendition. There was never a Mat who went to the hiding place of the Frank family. But the lessons to be learned from Mat are very real. Hatred is not the answer. Hatred hurts. Hatred destroys.

• The reality of the Holocaust--Today there are groups that spend time and money denying the Holocaust ever occurred. The Holocaust was real. There were millions of witnesses of the horrors, many of whom are still alive today, many of whom still have the physical marks of evidence. There are also bones, skeletons, photographs, and the actual prisons and burial grounds. To say there was no Holocaust is to rewrite history with a strange Stalinesque perversion of reality.

• We must never forget--The Holocaust was much too real, and tragedies that follow the pattern of the Holocaust continue in our world today. Look at Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Cambodia and the communist nations. In these places and in others, people were murdered simply because they belonged to one group or another. Could this happen in America? Is it happening now? We must always be vigilant in educating about the dangers of intolerance. We must never forget the lessons of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany.