The drama in the diary

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By John Anthony S. Estolloso

THERE IS no lack of records and stories about the Holocaust: both literature and cinema have given us more than enough. Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ and Anatoly Kuznetsov’s ‘Babi Yar’ have made it to the literary canon and surely, some of our film aficionados here have wept over Spielberg’s ‘Schindler’s List’ or Benigni’s ‘La vita e bella’.

Of course, Anne Frank’s autobiographical account stands tragically alongside these narratives. Whether the reader takes the diary as historical document or as literature is immaterial: to retell the story of the Holocaust – even if just an extract from it – is to tread upon the shards of one of history’s most shameful and inhumane episodes. More so if this is displayed as serious theater: enfleshed by the actor’s craft and the producer’s vision, both cast and company run the risk of cheapening the narrative and perhaps misrepresenting the gravitas of the theme.

The evenings of November 26 and 27 saw Anne Frank’s narrative brought to life again by Grade 10 students of Gamot Cogon. Staging Wendy Kesselman’s adaptation at UPV’s Little Theater, the play explored a leaner version of the memoir without losing touch of the deep humanity of the narrator’s appalling experiences, and despite the youth of the performers, nothing of the dramatic depth of the melancholic and the sanguine was lost to the audience.

Anyone who has an idea of the genocide during the Second World War is familiar with the contents of the memoir, as it is the story of almost every Jewish family that tried to survive through the ordeal. Two Dutch Jewish families – the Franks and the van Daans – and some of their acquaintances hide in the annex of one of the business establishments in Amsterdam. With the cramped quarters, the squalid conditions of the hiding place, and the incessant bickering of people confined for too long in such constrained circumstances, the diary reveals a girl’s intimate coming-of-age portrait, one that contrasts flawed humaneness against a background of hate and bigotry.

Strangely, it was in this sordid microcosm where kindness and benevolence blossomed. Underlining the mundane acts that people in normal situations would have taken for granted – journal entries, handmade gifts, deep conversations – the play’s two acts built up to a crescendo of this flowering of the human condition. Just when the audience became too comfortable with the warm optimism flowing from the stage, the narrative was cut abruptly by the Gestapo’s violently intrusive arrest of the annex’s occupants. The brusque ruthlessness that spilled fluids and broke ceramics onstage juxtaposed the serenity of the previous scenes and left a repressively gnawing terror that lingered wistfully in the imagination.

So chilling was the climactic scene that it rendered the audience silent: at the close of the performance, there was nothing of the raucous cheering that usually acclaims the actors. There was sustained applause, as heavy and solemn as the ashfall that once floated over the extermination camps at Sobibor and Auschwitz.

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To call the performance amateurish is understandable, given the production’s constraints of means and experience: it further begs the question of how students and faculty of a school with lean resources can mount a play with such depth and gravitas. But to label the production as a ‘mere’ school play would be an injustice to the seriousness and effort put in by cast and company. While the costumes, sets, lighting, and props may seem rather basic, their roughness nonetheless serve to underline something integral to the drama in the diary: the loss of innocence brought about by the crude blindness of political fanaticism.

In an interview after the performance, lead actress Jasmine Jaleco talked about the relevance of the play, how it is important for people today to look back to the Holocaust and learn from its horrors. And quite rightly so. When laws are weaponized to oppress and silence people, when discourse encourages the justification of extrajudicial killings, when bigotry and hate become the bywords spewed out from political podiums, when the fruits of science and business are turned into instruments of carnage and destruction, then it does well to remind the public that these terrible events have happened before, and they remain a dishonorable stain on human history.

And given the chance, they can happen again. But only if we let them so.

(The author is the subject area coordinator for Social Studies in one of the private schools in the city. Anne Frank’s photo is from Britannica; the photos of the play are from GCWS.)