Posted by When I was a freshman in high school, I played the part of Mr Dussel in a stage production of The Diary of Anne Frank. That’s pronounced Anna Frahnk. I’m sure most people know her story. It was an emotionally charged play, to say the least.
Amsterdam is home to the house where Anne Frank, her family and several others (including my Mr Dussel) hid for those wretched years during World War II. It was particularly special for to me to visit that house, to remember the similiarities between our set design and the real thing, to see with my eyes the place where she and others were forced to live out their remaining years because of hatred and intolerance and evil. It almost brought a tear to mine eye, I’ll admit.
Despite the audio elements added to the house and the hushed chatter of the tourists, there is still a certain silence, a languishing memory in the walls and sealed windows. It speaks of hope banished to the furthest reaches of the mind, of potential snuffed by the basest of horrors. Elie Weisel’s Night conveyed the stark and uncompromising horror of the Holocaust, without sentimentality or extraneous prose. I wonder if he thought about the Anne Frank and that house when he was writing it.
Anne Frank’s father survived the Holocaust but his family was not so fortunate. I can’t imagine what it was to make it thru only to discover that all you worked for and cherished was so easily destroyed. I don’t have anything else to write – no eloquent phrase to offer to convey the weight of a diminshed life, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Stop.
