#AnneFrank. Parallel Stories
One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows-Primo Levi. The Oscar®-winning Helen Mirren will introduce audiences to Anne Frank's story through the words in her diary. The set will be her room in the secret refuge in Amsterdam, reconstructed in every detail by set designers from the Piccolo Theatre in Milan. Anne Frank this year would have been 90 years old. Anne's story is intertwined with that of five Holocaust survivors, teenage girls just like her, with the same ideals, the same desire to live: Arianna Szörenyi, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard, Helga Weiss and sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci. Their testimonies alternate with those of their children and grandchildren.
Taking time to remember gives a voice to those that lost everything. 75 years is a life time, a mother’s lifetime, a grandmother’s lifetime yet when I look out the window at all the hate and intolerance it’s a wonder that any time has passed at all. I don’t understand how one human can look at another and see something less then themselves. How is it that hatred is left to breathe and breed. Is encouraged to breathe and breed. What is it that is meant to be gained by such animosity. I fear that if things don’t change substantially, and soon, we are destined to repeat this horror as the last of its witnesses fade into memory, no longer around to show us, tell us, how bad it can truly get. I hope I’m wrong.