ANNE FRANK: PARALLEL STORIES

“Be kind and have courage” – The words written inside Anne Frank’s diary cover

A review by Tanya Howard

Anne Frank: Parallel Stories is narrated by Helen Mirren and uses excerpts from Anne’s very own diary to guide viewers through her harrowing story, whilst intertwining the stories of five Holocaust survivors, Arianna Szörenyi, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard, Helga Weiss and sisters Andra & Tatiana Bucci.

Once teenage girls just like Anne, they too suffered persecution and deportation when they were very young. They were denied the carefree light-heartedness of their youth; they lost their families, friends and loved ones in the concentration camps. These stories of the survivors of the Holocaust put words on the blank pages of Anne’s diary, as it fell silent when everyone in the secret refuge in Amsterdam was arrested on August 4th, 1944.

If Anne Frank had survived the Holocaust, she would be turning 90 this year and it makes you wonder if this is still a story that needs to be told. Simply put the answer is yes, this wasn’t a story of fiction, it wasn’t made up, it was real life and people need to remember that people went through these horrific experiences.

Helen Mirren reads excerpts from Anne’s diary whilst the films takes the audience on a journey through the timeline of Hitler’s attempt to create a master race, featuring photos, clips, drawings and more from that time. Survivors of the Holocaust feature in the film and discuss their experiences and how they have survived since being freed from the concentration camps.

One thing I really took from the film is that the experience has stayed with the survivors, and they will never forget the sounds, smells, colours and memories from that time. However, they are proud to have survived and their revenge to the Nazis are their kids, their grandkids, their ability to learn to love again without being lost to their hate for the Nazis.

The trauma does get passed on through the families though, with their story, their legend, their responsibility to teach people about what they went through is passed on through the generations. Some children said they couldn’t grasp the horror of their grandparent’s experience, but Anne Frank’s story made it more real as they realised that had they been born in a different time and place that could have happened to them.

Anne has become the face of the Shoah, the Hebrew word for Holocaust, and hearing excerpts from her diary not only make everything more real but it also shows that at the base of it all she was just a young girl trying to find the best out of a rough life. She wrote of first kisses, first loves, her jealousy of her sister, rows with her mother, about a favourite pair of red shoes she got as a birthday present. She also said how she wanted to go on living after death and mentioned how she would have liked to publish her notebooks and diaries under the name Backhouse.

Anne’s diary was a present for her 13^th birthday and she named it ‘Kitty’ as she wanted to feel like she was writing to a friend and not just listing facts. When the Frank family and those living with them in the hidden rooms were captured they only had a few moments to grab their belongings and the diary was actually left on the floor of her room. It was retrieved by Miep Gies, who gave it to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, just after the war was over.

Otto Frank was the only surviving member of their family, and before they were captured, he had repeatedly to get visas for his family to leave but sadly was not successful and so they had to go into hiding. Following his release, he had Anne’s book published, and spent years fighting on behalf of anti-Semitism as did many of the survivors.

It was interesting to find out more about Anne Frank but to also hear new perspectives on this horrific time from other survivors and I’m glad they came together to tell their stories. Arianna Szörenyi survived 4 concentration camps, and Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard was almost arrested in the largest raid on French soil but she managed to escape and hid for two years before being caught at 16.

Andra and Tatianna Bucci lost their cousin to Josef Mengele, named “Doctor Death”, who would trick children into thinking he was taking them to see their parents but was actually experimenting on them. He particularly liked to experiment on twins, which Andra and Tatianna were mistaken for, but luckily they had been warned by a friend and avoided his horrendous surgeries and mutilations he performed.

Whislt Anne found escape in her diary, Helga Weiss drew to keep herself sane and is now known for her drawings that depict life at Terezin. Her father told her to “draw what you see” and she did just that whilst captive in what was called the Girl’s Home. Her diary which featured these drawings was published and released in 2013.

One of the most surprising and shocking things that I found out in this film was that the guards were the same age as the younger captees but became their torturers. They forced those captured to dig the common graves they would eventually be buried in. They would make prisoners move the dead bodies and punish them if they weren’t strong enough to drag them to the graves.

When the camps were finally freed the police made the Germans nearby come and watch to make a point that they ignored what was happening so close, and the guards were made to carry the corpses with their bare hands to their graves. Irma Grese, nicknamed the “Hyena of Auschwitz”, joined the Hilter Youth at the age of 15, and Arianna remembered being held at gun point by her when she was just 11 years old. Irma was executed at 22 years old for her crimes against Jews.

In total 23,200 people were buried during the Holocaust, and many including Anne Frank are buried in an unknown grave, and instead are remembered by a headstone at the site of their former camp. IT’s disgusting to think that despite this the Nazis created propaganda of a happy time, of them moving the Jewish population to a new home where they could live in freedom, a hoax to cover their crimes.

Although the Holocaust now seems like a historic event year in the past, we still see people today vilifying those they class as different. These people are punished, run out of their homes and even killed and it only takes one radical person to set off a chain of events that could lead to a similar situation. We need to learn from the horrors of these people’s experiences and try to stop anything like this happening again.

I would definitely recommend watching Anne Frank: Parallel Stories, it will educate you further on the Holocaust and the story of Anne Frank, and it also serves as a reminder to keep this story alive. The film will be in UK and Irish Cinemas from 27th January to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day. Watch the trailer here: https://bit.ly/37GCXBz