The Diary of Anne Frank: DVD & TV Movie

One of the central purposes of video,TV and broadway productions of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ was to encourage viewers to relate the film to their own lives. This I have done in the following prose-poem:

TAKING OUR WORLD BY STORM

On August 1st 1944, nine days after I was born, Anne Frank made her last entry in what has become one of the famous books of our time: The Diary of Anne Frank. The book is now said to be the largest selling non-fiction book after The Bible. Anne died just before her 16th birthday in March 1945 in a German concentration camp. But Anne lives on in her diary, arguably the major, the popular, voice of the Jews from the Holocaust of WW2. The first edition of her diary came out in 1952; the first Broadway production in 1955 and the first movie in March 1959. This Dutch Jewish teenager also lived on in several television productions. One of these I saw last night. -Ron Price with thanks to “History Thru The Lens: The Diary of Anne Frank: Echoes From the Past,” Southern Cross TV, 12:30-2:30 a.m., 20 January 2006.

You were just becoming known
to a wider public, to any public,
at the same time as this new Faith
was becoming known to me and
to another wider world right back
at the start of what they & we called
that Kingdom of God on earth.

Your diary went on Broadway
in the midst of that crisis in ’55.
Of course, there are always troubles
in Iran; like the Jews it seems, a place
of endless struggle. Not that it meant
much to me back then when I was 15
and your diary became a movie--in ’59,
released two days before Naw Ruz.
I was playing baseball and hockey,
trying to make it with girls and school
and just having entered the outer fringes
of a Movement that was & would become
the greatest drama in religious history
and certainly provide the greatest drama
in my life and in the future of humankind.

That spring and summer of ’59
the world understood more of
that enormity, that tragedy,
that unbelievable horror
through your eloquent voice
from the past, death’s corridors
for those who speak no more.
And I came closer and closer
to a Force that took my life by storm,
unobtrusively, quietly, seductively.

Ron Price
January 21st 2006