Anne Frank may be the most famous Jew interned and killed in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. She was but one of 5,886,000 who lost their lives in the genocide.
Iola High School drama students will tell the stories of Frank and others in “And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank,” tonight and Friday night at 7 o’clock on the Bowlus Fine Arts Center stage. Admission is free.
Drew Smith, Jasmine Bannister, Cody Cokely and Violet McCullough all have dual roles. Jordan Strickler portrays a Hitler youth. The young actors approach their roles with the somber pragmatism demanded by their characters’ horrific circumstances.
The show also asks much from students who perform offstage. Maggie Terhune, lighting operator, is at the top of her game throughout the 90-minute presentation, tracking as many as four actors at a time as they dart about the stage delivering brief soliloquies.
The play’s media operators, Breezy Burke, Katie Lieurance and Courtney Smith, also have to be attuned to cues, as the audience’s attention moves from the stage to three large video screens showing recorded remembrances by Jews who survived the Holocaust.
The testimonials come from Ed Silverberg and Eva Schloss. Silverberg was Anne Frank’s friend for a year, in 1942, when he was 16 and she 13. He was captured by the Nazis and escaped. Schloss spent nine months in the Auschwitz concentration camp where Frank was killed a few days before its liberation.
THAT DIRECTOR Richard Spencer and his young actors and back-stage technicians would attempt such an intense presentation is tribute to their skills and enthusiasm for stagecraft.
They deliver lines such as these:
“It was not unusual for people just to disappear. I saw Anne that morning, but not again,” says Smith as young Ed.
“How is it possible for them (the Nazis) to be so cruel,” says Bannister as young Eva, who awoke one night from a painful toe only to see a rat biting it.
“I have been a Nazi since age 7 and I will do as I am commanded,” says Strickler, in explaining his recovery from the grief of being ordered to strangle his puppy.
THE PLAY is an all-too-real remembrance of the inhumanity that Hitler’s Nazi regime visited on the world from the mid-1930s until the war in Europe ended May 8, 1945.
It also is a commentary on today.
In the final scene, the message on the video screen reads, “They came for the Jews and since I wasn’t a Jew, I ignored it.” The word “Jews” is replaced with “homosexual,” “Mexican,” “Muslim” and “me.”
