When you turn on the television in the morning and see some sort of disaster, you are glued to events, sometimes for hours. It always seems so far away — volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes or plane crashes, you feel bad for the people that it’s happening to, but you always think “I’m glad it didn’t happen here.”

Yesterday, I woke up to news that a 747 jumbo jet had crashed at the Halifax International Airport, about 10-15 minutes from my house. Luckily the jet was a cargo plane, so it wasn’t full of passengers, but it did have seven crew members on board — there were no survivors.

Apparently the tail of the plane snapped off during take-off, leaving the pilots totally unable to control the aircraft. The plane crashed into the woods seconds after liftoff, exploding into a fireball that reportedly lit up the early morning sky.

MK Airlines, have had four planes crash since 1990, but company officials said they wanted to concentrate on the families of this crash — fair enough, but we also have to know what the cause of the accident is.

“Utter Destruction” is how the crash site has been describe by witnesses. My sympathies go out to the families of the crash.

Monique and I have been very fortunate these past few years. We have been able to travel a little and see some really nice theatre performances. We have seen 42 St. on Broadway with Melanie Griffith and a very nice play in London, England when we were there two years ago. Neither one of those compares to The Diary of Anne Frank, a play we saw last weekend in Halifax.

The cast of the play did a terrific job, drawing you into the middle of the daily struggles that Anne and her family had to endure. The woman that played Anne was so believable — you were riveted by her every word, wondering what she was going to say, wondering what the next thing to happen to the family would be.

The stage was setup to look like the attic that the families had to live in for nearly two years. During the day they had to be quiet all day — no walking with shoes on, no talking, coughing, etc. — nothing that would alert the workers down below that someone was upstairs.

After two years of hiding from the Germans, someone told the Gestapo where the families were hiding. Anne and her family were taken to separate concentration camps, where all but Anne’s father died. After the war, Anne’s father returned to Amsterdam and was given the diary that Anne kept through the years of hiding. He allowed a few people to read the diary and it was eventually published.

We took our nine and 11 year old kids to see the play, hoping they would have a better understanding of what people had to go through during the war. Monique’s parents were 12 or 13 in Amsterdam when the Nazi’s invaded and last night at Thanksgiving dinner her father told us about when the Gestapo burst into their house and took his father away. His father was detained and put into a concentration camp, but he lived. I think between the play and the discussion at dinner, the kids got some real life experiences on World War II.