Film Brings New Life to Anne Frank’s Diary

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Of all the actors, athletes and hip-hop performers venerated by urban teenagers in Southern California, most improbable of all, perhaps, was a 13-year-old girl by the name of Anne Frank. So goes the inspiring story behind “Freedom Writers,” a new movie starring Hilary Swank. The film’s Friday (Jan. 5) […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Of all the actors, athletes and hip-hop performers venerated by urban teenagers in Southern California, most improbable of all, perhaps, was a 13-year-old girl by the name of Anne Frank.

So goes the inspiring story behind “Freedom Writers,” a new movie starring Hilary Swank. The film’s Friday (Jan. 5) release is timed to precede the nation’s commemoration of another figure in the ongoing fight against racial prejudice: Martin Luther King Jr.


Based on a true story, “Freedom Fighters” shows how a young teacher named Erin Gruwell in 1994 started teaching at Wilson High, a public school in Long Beach, Calif., immediately following the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. At 23, Gruwell was brimming with idealism but woefully ignorant of the tough realities her underprivileged students faced in ongoing turf wars between rival gangs of Hispanics, Chinese and African-Americans.

Her naivete ended abruptly one day when Gruwell intercepted a racially charged cartoon as it was passed around the classroom. “I immediately went ballistic, and compared it to the propaganda of the Holocaust,” Gruwell recalled. “Then one of the children asked me timidly, `What is the Holocaust?’ I asked how many of the rest of the class had never heard of the Holocaust and, horrifically, none of them had.”

Stunned, Gruwell decided that learning more about ethnic hatred fomented by the Nazis might shed light on her students’ daily experience of prejudice, and assigned “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the best-selling book that chronicles the 25 months Frank’s family hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam. Frank died in a concentration camp in 1945 at age 15.

Gruwell also suggested they might try keeping diaries of their own and gave them each a notebook.

“So many of my students were angry, and wanting to lash out with fists or handguns,” Gruwell said. “But I wanted to teach that there were other ways to combat injustice, like how Anne Frank fought back with words. Anne expressed my students’ feeling that they were birds in a cage and had never been able to fly.”

Swank, who plays Gruwell in the film and serves as the film’s executive producer, said Gruwell saw a parallel between Anne Frank and her students. “Anne Frank was trapped and judged because of her religion. When Erin saw they could relate to this, she thought that maybe it could help spark their interest to read a book and begin to write themselves.”

It was not an easy sell. Maria Reyes, one of Gruwell’s students whose story is told in “Freedom Writers,” admits she was cynical at first. Reyes said reading had never been a priority _ she was 15 and reading at a fourth-grade level _ and “The Diary of Anne Frank” was the first volume she’d ever read cover to cover.


“The only reason I bothered to try was that Miss G told me I would find myself in Anne Frank’s diary,” Reyes recalled. “I thought Miss G was full of it, and I wanted to prove her wrong.”

She later had what she called an “epiphany” at the book’s end, when Reyes saw Frank’s famous declaration that people are really good at heart.

“I read this sentence over and over,” Reyes said. “I suddenly realized that we are all prisoners of our own stories, and we are trapped in the world that is. Anne Frank taught me to see the world like it could be.”

According to Jack Polack, chairman emeritus of the Anne Frank Center in New York City, “The Diary of Anne Frank” is, after the Bible, the most widely read book in the world. It’s an especially good book for adolescents, he said.

“The diary describes everything they think about, but in a mature way. Anne Frank writes about religion and nature; she talks about war and the suffering it causes. She worries over sex and is very bitter about her relationship with her parents,” Polack said. “It is all written so clearly that children realize she is their peer. They are experiencing so much of what she is living with that they can relate to it immediately.”

Gruwell took her class on a field trip to the Museum of Tolerance and Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Later she arranged for them to meet several actual Holocaust survivors _ Renee Firestone, Eddie Ilam, Elisabeth Mann and Gloria Ungar _ who all appear as themselves in “Freedom Writers.”


Eventually, the students raised money to bring Miep Gies from Holland; it was Gies who helped care for the Frank family and several others as they hid from the Gestapo in an attic, or Secret Annex, during World War II.

At the same time, students continued to describe their own lives in their own diaries; excerpts were published in “The Freedom Writers Diary” (1999, Doubleday). They took the name after learning about the Freedom Riders who fought against segregation during the civil rights movement.

After helping her class graduate from high school, and seeing many of them graduate from college, Gruwell resigned from Wilson High School and now runs the Erin Gruwell Education Project to help other teachers implement her methods.

As part of this curriculum, she continues to urge children to read “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, said the diary maintains its timeless power because it touches on the universal experience of losing childish innocence and starting to become an adult.

“Here is a girl, who in the beginning of her life, everything was wonderful. But her life was taken over, and it was no longer in her control,” said Hier. “Many teenagers experience something like Anne Frank, as they suddenly notice a change in their lives: Someone dies, someone is in jail, or there is a divorce, and their lives feel suddenly locked in. The question is, will we remain stuck this way, or can we somehow reach inside and unlock ourselves? In Anne’s case, it was her diary that unlocked her life.”


KRE/PH END HENDERSON

Editors: To obtain photos of Swank and Gruwell, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

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