AUTHOR'S NOTE
Few names, and lives, are as well known as Anne Frank, at least the part that she recorded and recounted. And of course plays and movies also retell the story of this young woman, her friends, family and captivity hiding from the horrors now known as the Holocaust.
This Anne Frank play (as well as an Otto Frank and Frank family play) is not, however, a retelling of the story everyone knows. It's begins when the people who arrested her literally pick up the pages of the diary, deem they hav no value and tossthe pages back to the floor. They took the candlesticks, but left the diary. And we follow events as some otherd put down those pages, but as gradually a book is born.
Otto Frank, Anne Frank's father, returned from his own horros, was given the diary that Miep had picked it up from the floor and kept sage. Otto Frank didn't know what to do with it and I'm sure it was at once an incredibly painful and beautiful moment - when he read Anne’s thoughts.
He wasn't sure whether to try to publish, and then saw passages critical of his wife etc. In the end he decided to try, but nobody was interested. Finally, he found someone who was. This play is about that persitence, pain and pleasure, about fathers and daughters and about how Anne Frank despite a pointless death accomplished her dream to be an author.
The first reader for what would become the diary's U.S. publisher saw nothing special here. It was just a girl writing her thoughts and recounting events with her family. A well known editor vowed to fight and come up with a way to get it published. But she did. The diary survived - and this script is about that story including flashbacks. The actress portraying Anne, it turns out, is from the Netherlands, speaks Dutch and certainly knows Anne, the story and more, not just as “history” but as “herstory.”
In addition, my family history unfortunately fits in with what happened, including people killed and people who escaped. Some people survived. And somehow, Anne's words lived on and continue to echo long after that era's horrible events ended. There is no happy ending to Anne Frank’s story, but in one of history’s stranger twists, there is no end either.
