Anne Frank the story of a young girl during the Holocaust
The story of Anne Frank is remarkable and a stark reminder of what intolerance, bigotry and a lack of compassion can do to a race of individuals.
Anne Frank was a young girl who kept a diary of her life in Amsterdam. She was of Jewish faith and living in hiding in her father’s factory. She and seven individuals were concealed from the outside world during World War II.
Anne and the individuals who were hiding with her, including members of her family, didn’t survive the Holocaust, but her Father and diary did. In the 1970’s the diary was published and to this day is still one of the highest selling non-fiction books.
#AnneFrank- Parallel Stories presents the story of Anne Frank with a number of the diary entries narrated and discussed by Helen Mirren.
As a way to highlight the age of Anne Frank when she was writing in her diary, a young woman, around the age of Anne, tours around a number of sites mentioned in the diary including the Anne Frank Museum, memorials around France and Poland and a concentration camp. It is a very moving piece to the documentary.
But what is captivating about this program is the interviews. A number of the surviving children from the Holocaust are in the late 80s and early 90s, similar age to Anne Frank if she was alive today, are interviewed and recollect the difficult time in their life.
The heartbreaking aspect of this screening is having the survivors retell their experiences from living through the Holocaust and their time in a concentration camp, a horrific time of history. The importance of these interviews is what they remember, the family members they lost and the sometimes difficult memory of parents doing anything to care for their children while in a concentration camp.
The theme that is presented time and again by the survivors and what they have have learned through their ordeal and the ideals they believe would stop anything like this from happening again. These ideals are tolerance, acceptance and compassion.
#AnneFrank- Parallel Stories is a remarkable documentary currently available to stream on Netflix.
