A New Understanding
Posted by Claire Elizabeth Saxe on 4/18/2007The day that we staged and ran the ending of the play for the first time was a turning point for me. On that day I understood the story that we were telling and the Holocaust in a way that I had never understood it before. I remember standing in the rehearsal hall, looking at the pretend mess of a pretend home strewn across the boundaries of our pretend Secret Annex and I was overwhelmed by the thought that this was once real. The thought slammed into me, and nearly knocked me to the ground. I was overwhelmed by this terrifying awareness of the closeness of death, by the understanding that these people were so alive and then in a moment all promise of their future was torn from them. And then there was this literally unbelievable fact of history that there are people in the world who can do this to other people. There are thousands and thousands of individuals who WOULD and DID willingly inflict this unimaginable suffering on so many. I can’t fathom it. I can’t comprehend it as a truth. The thought literally won’t settle as fact in my mind, and thus keeps bouncing around, this haunting shadow, this menacing threat of reality. It haunts me, dark and foreboding, the way trying to imagine the death of my family members haunts me.
This was the experience that led me past my almost scientific “understanding” of the Holocaust, written in my mind in textbook figures of tragedy, horror and suffering. Since that day, I feel that I Understand it in a way that I never could have had it not been for this show.
After the first time we ran the ending of the play, I became afraid that our audiences would not really Understand. I was terrified that our show would not move them. Now that we’ve begun previews, and have shared the show with several audiences and have seen their reactions, I feel guilty for wishing that Understanding on others. Now I’m afraid that people will Understand.
On the second night of previews about 25 people from my block came to see the show. After the show there was a gathering at one of the neighbor’s houses. Everyone told me how powerful it was that we stayed on stage at intermission, and how moving the end was, and how badly they had wanted a happier ending. They all congratulated me, and patted me on the back, and I smiled and thanked them for coming. I was so touched that they had all come and that they had loved it as much as they had. About 45 minutes into the gathering I noticed Katie, a young neighbor, about 11 years old, standing off to the side of a huddle of people. As the crowd dispersed a bit I walked towards her. “The show was really good,” she told me. She paused, shifting thoughts and feelings around behind her big, blue eyes. When she spoke again, her voice came out uncertainly, the words twisted through an uncomfortable smile. “I cried,” she said. I put my hand on her arm and my heart sank. She Understands, I thought, and in that moment I suddenly regretted every wish I had made that everyone would Understand. There was silence, and I could see her thinking. “It’s scary,” she admitted, her words faltering, her smile uncertain, tears threatening to spill over her gold lashes. “It’s scary that there are people who would actually do things like that and think of things like that, that people could do that to some just because they’re different.” I saw her connecting all those lessons about diversity and acceptance and not judging others because of their religion or the color of their skin to this horror story tumbling through her mind. I felt the threat of tears well up in my own throat. I wanted badly to take back the past four hours of her life, make her not have to know all this. I felt like she was too young, too smart, too loving to be asked to take all of this on. I looked at her and I saw behind her eyes a real, true understanding of the cruelty of the world and the fear of this truth. I reached for her arm and tried to smile. “But there’s lots of good in the world, too,” I offered weakly. “Remember that. Remember that there are lots of good people, too.” “Yeah,” she said, and continued with uncertainty backed by wisdom too great for her years, to try and rationalize, to explain that it was scary that there used to be people like that, but that there are so many good people now, and that most people aren’t like that…and that while there are still some people who are like that, most people are not…trying to convince us both that the world would be all right.
Some tiny little part of me, the yearning activist, wanted these feelings to lead her to act against the hatred and violence that is still going on in the world, wanted to allow her to know that terrible things like this are still happening, wanted to say, “This is why this story is important, so people can see it and really understand, so we can stop something that awful from ever happening again.”
But I didn’t. Because a bigger part of me saw the young girl standing before me with knowledge and wisdom behind her eyes, a girl who Understood. And I wanted to take it all back.
May 7th, 2007 at 11:49 am
I went to see the play last night, wandering about how this adaptation would influence my understanding of Anne’s story as one of the Holocausts most heard of voices. Watching the movie, a long time ago left me with an undefined feeling of emptiness, I almost felt like her message passed by me in an odd way, like I couldn’t connect with her inner world but only with the dark reality. And in light of the facts, that last line in the diary about the human nature being good in essence made me somewhat angry, because it seemed like pure moral propaganda, a glimpse of hope at the end, so that the audience doesn’t leave disappointed.
But Tina Landau’s adaptation and the brilliant performance of the cast gave me that understanding. It was a very powerful inside to Anne’s world. It was a turn around for me, as I realized that those people could have been us, their reactions, their emotions, their sufferance could have been ours. The amazing facets of their experience were revealed in an undeniable way: the characters became real on stage; there were no more borders between the two worlds. They recreated the emotions with such intensity that I felt guilty leaving my seat during intermission, or continuing with my dinner plans after the play, or taking my life as it is now for granted. Anne made us face a dark reality, in a sense of human nature contemplation. After this I couldn’t hold my thoughts to myself, I felt almost like the characters had invaded my mind asking for their right to be remembered.
The only thing that makes us any different from them is that we have the power to never let that happen ever again, that we can speak up their voices.
I want to congratulate the entire team, for their talent and efforts!