Julie McDonald Commentary: Talented Cast Showcases Tragic Life of Anne Frank

I laughed. I cried. I knew going into the Evergreen Playhouse how the story ended, but it proved a poignant emotional roller coaster as the cast gave a wonderful performance this month of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Fifteen-year-old Ruby Stanton, who was 8 when she first performed at the playhouse, excelled in her portrayal of the energetic, enthusiastic and effervescent Anne, a Jewish girl hiding with her family in a secret attic. I told my friends, “Someday we’ll say we knew Ruby Stanton when …”

After the play, her proud mother, longtime Chronicle writer Carrina Stanton, shared how Ruby took to the stage after seeing her first play. I remember seeing Ruby perform years ago in “A Christmas Carol.”

But this play was special. 

“It was a bittersweet ending for her for sure,” Carrina said. “These plays take so much time and emotional and physical effort that it is a relief when they are over, but this cast and this story was very special to Ruby.”

Ruby had worked with the director, Danielle Kays, and several cast members in other Evergreen Playhouse productions, but Anne’s story touched her heart.

“I knew it was a really important story to be telling for our world right now, and I was so proud of Ruby to really take the role of Anne and embrace it,” Carrina said. “We had a lot of talks in our house about what it might have been like to be Anne and how it was so important to tell her story truthfully, even the difficult or unflattering parts, because in the end she was just an ordinary girl who met a very tragic end, but it is her humanity that makes the story so compelling.”

Both Anne Frank, the Jewish diarist in hiding, and Ruby Stanton, who has performed with the W.F. West theater program since sixth grade, are brave and talented girls. 

The vivacious energetic teenage girl trapped for more than two years in the secret attic kept a positive outlook, despite occasional spats with her mother and chastisement from adults, including the at-times surly dentist who shared a room with her.

“As long as this exists, this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?” she wrote. 

Her story resonated with so many people.

“As a daughter of Dutch immigrants who came to the U.S. before World War II, I am so appreciative of Anne’s diary being found so the world knows the truth about what happened in The Netherlands and Nazi Germany,” said Centralia’s Edna Fund, a former Lewis County commissioner. “The Evergreen Theatre’s play tells that real story and does it in such a professional way.”

Sharlene Arras, of Chehalis, recalled watching the 1959 film, but seeing the play gave her a different perspective of life in “the attic” and took her through a spectrum of emotions — excitement of the unknown, humor found in daily events, frustration and despair.

“The heartfelt narrative presented by (Dan Overton as) Otto Frank, outlining the timeline of the final events of the ‘eight,’ was emotional and had the tears flowing down the cheek,” she said. “I would like to commend the cast for their ability to have the audience connect with the characters.”

For Olga Miller, of Napavine, the play took her back to her teen years, when she first read “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and to her moving 2001 visit to the secret attic in Amsterdam where Anne and the others hid for 761 days.

“It is difficult to understand the mindset of hate which drove Hitler’s policies that brought about the Holocaust against a people simply because they were Jews,” she said. “The cast is to be commended for their convincing and moving performance in reminding us of one man’s inhumanity to man.”

Like Miller, the play drew me back to my visit to Amsterdam during a month-long whirlwind trip through Europe in 1993 with my mother. I cherished our time together touring palaces, museums and historic sites. We rode a canal boat to the Anne Frank House, where we waited in a slow-moving line that snaked up the stairs. Video presentations with the audio in different languages told the story about the Frank and Van Daan families and the dentist, Mr. Dussel, who hid in the secret attic reached by hidden stairs behind a bookcase.

Glass covered the photos of Greta Garbo, Ray Milland and other movie stars pinned to the walls of Anne’s room. The Nazis cleared the furniture from the house, so all that remained were an old wood stove, sink and toilet. Large white boards depicted pictures of Otto and Edith Frank with their daughters, Margot and Anne, in Germany and later in Amsterdam before the Nazi occupation. They told of Anne’s dreams of becoming a writer.

Tears filled my eyes as I read of the mistreatment of the Jewish people and viewed photos of a mass grave in a concentration camp with hundreds of naked corpses, piled carelessly one upon another. Anger surged through me toward the Germans who had perpetrated such atrocities. Other whiteboards told about World War II, the rise of Neo-Nazism and ethnic cleansing and the Holocaust deniers who insist the deaths never happened.

My husband, a longtime opinion page editor at the Chronicle, met one such person in Lewis County who had submitted a letter to the editor denying the Holocaust. The newspaper published one of his letters but refused to print more.

The man said something to the effect that my husband’s surname, Zander, sounded like a German name.

“It’s either Dutch or German,” my husband responded to the Holocaust denier, “but I prefer to think it is Dutch.”

It’s actually German. So what’s a good Irish lass doing with a German-Czech-English American mutt?

The play also took me back to 2013, when I visited Israel and toured Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, and walked on a glass floor with a display of Holocaust victims’ shoes beneath it. Were Anne’s shoes there? Her sister Margot’s?

Outside, we walked through an underground cavern lit only by memorial candles resembling shooting stars that pierced the darkness while a voice recited the names, ages and hometowns of each of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust. We also visited the Hall of Remembrance, where a mosaic floor lists the names of 22 infamous murder sites and a stone crypt contains the ashes of Jews exterminated during the Holocaust. I wondered if that was the final resting place of Annelies Marie “Anne” Frank and her sister, Margot Betti Frank, who died of typhus within a day of each other in February 1945 at the Bergen-Belson concentration camp.

The Evergreen Playhouse brought Anne’s story to Centralia with authentic reality. In fact, after the performance, I spoke with Theresa McKenzieSullivan, who portrayed a female SS agent. She pointed out that the SS uniform she wore was authentic, once worn by hunters of Jews in hiding. 

Her words sent chills up my spine. The actors felt the same.

“They all hated putting those uniforms on and only kept them on as long as they had to,” Carrina said. “They all said they felt a real dark presence being in them.”

Ruby plans to continue acting. She also plays the violin in the W.F. West orchestra, takes vocal lessons, and participates in tennis. She may pursue acting, or perhaps she’ll teach music. Whatever path she follows, she’s likely to excel.

The director, Danielle Kays, described “The Diary of Anne Frank” as one of her passion projects.

“It is my hope that we bring her words to life today,” she wrote. “It is important that the Frank family, the Van Daan family, Mr. Dussel, the helpers and all of the unnamed do not go quietly into the night. Their stories should be shared. Their lives were important. Their dreams were real. And through Anne’s words, we can remember and honor them.”

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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.