COMMENTARY: A new, more realistic and gripping Anne Frank comes to Broadway

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the National Interreligious Affairs Director of the American Jewish Committee.) UNDATED _ The life and death of the Jewish teenager Anne Frank has become a well-known symbol of the Holocaust. For 25 months, between 1942 and 1944, Anne and seven other Jews, including her parents and sister, […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the National Interreligious Affairs Director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ The life and death of the Jewish teenager Anne Frank has become a well-known symbol of the Holocaust. For 25 months, between 1942 and 1944, Anne and seven other Jews, including her parents and sister, successfully hid from the German occupation forces in Holland who were rounding up Jews for murder.


Tragically, Anne’s hiding place in an Amsterdam attic was discovered and the eight were arrested and deported to death camps. During her years of hiding, Anne kept a diary that was found after the war by one of the Dutch Christians who had aided the Franks and their friends. Anne’s father was the only one of the eight who survived the Holocaust. Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany just a few months before the end of World War II. She was 15 years old.

Anne’s poignant diary became an international best seller, and 263 Prinsengracht, the building where she hid, has remained a shrine for millions of visitors. In the 1950s Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett wrote a stage play,”The Diary of Anne Frank,”that won a Pulitzer Prize, and a highly popular film followed the Broadway success.

Forty years later,”The Diary of Anne Frank”is again on Broadway, but it is significantly revised and quite different from the earlier versions.

The older stage and film productions downplayed the critical fact that Anne was forced to hide because she was Jewish. Instead, the”universal”aspects of the young girl were emphasized; her Jewishness was minimized. Great emphasis was placed upon the diary entry asserting Anne’s belief that”in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” A tepid Hanukkah holiday celebration was the older play’s most specific Jewish reference. In an effort to spare the audience of 40 years ago from the deadly fate of Anne, the play simply ended with the wail of sirens and the sound of police smashing the attic’s entry door.

Some critics, including novelist Meyer Levin, correctly charged that Goodrich and Hackett had deliberately sanitized the horror of the Holocaust.

But the 1998 version of”The Diary of Anne Frank”is”newly adapted”by Wendy Kesselman, and is far more explicit than the earlier production.

The play opens in July 1942 just as the Franks arrive for the first time in their new home: a cramped attic atop an old Amsterdam office building. Even though it is summer, the family is wearing heavy overcoats. As they remove them, the audience immediately sees the large yellow Stars of David every Jew was required to wear in German-occupied Europe. This startling opening scene sets the tone for the rest of the play.

Even though the ebullient Anne pastes movie star photos on the wall and dreams of being a novelist after the war, the terror of the Holocaust and the presence of virulent anti-Semitism are present, like additional characters in the play. In this play, the Jewishness of the trapped people is not minimized.


The hopefulness of the first act _ when hiding in the attic is an exciting novelty _ disappears by the second act, set two years later, when hunger, ragged clothing, fear, and tension dominate the stage.

The new version’s ending is far more frightening than the original production. Instead of sirens and smashed doors, Anne and the other seven Jews are eating the delicious strawberries their Christian friends have brought them, along with the exciting news that the American and British armies are nearing Amsterdam. Liberation seems so near.

It is at this rare moment of sweet hope that three armed men silently and suddenly enter the secret hiding place. They wear large swastika arm bands, and because of their stealth, it takes Anne some time realize that after two years of forced seclusion she has been captured. It is all over.

As the play concludes, Anne’s father returns to the hiding place after the war and painfully recounts how Anne and her attic companions died. While Anne Frank”believed people were really good at heart,”millions of other people did not share her view. The persistence of radical evil is the real message of the new play.

DEA END RUDIN

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