Happy Birthday, Anne Frank

Today would have been Anne Frank’s 84th birthday. Hard to believe that, had she lived, she would still be alive and of a reasonably perk old age.

When I was a nerdy bookworm kid, her diary was one of my touchstone books. I read it many times, morbidly relating to her simple story of hope as many lonely diary-hoarding kids before me had done, I am sure. 

In 1945, Anne Frank died of typhus at Bergen Belsen concentration camp under the Nazi regime. In the years before that, while in hiding with her family and another family in a small annex in  Amsterdam, she wrote in a diary which was left behind when their hiding place was discovered (betrayed by an informant) and the occupants were all taken away by the SS. Ultimately, only Anne’s father, Otto, survived, and he eventually got his hands on the diary. It was published under the title Diary of Young Girl in 1952. This title is poignant because it refers to what is so compelling about Anne’s diary: how absolutely universal it is in sentiment, despite the specific and horrific circumstances.

I’ve always been fixated on Anne Frank’s story and so I was thrilled that my first invitation to a Broadway play, sometime back in my twenties / the 90s, was to Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl. Natalie Portman played Anne Frank when she was just 16. Here’s a clip:

I was living in Washington DC but often took the train to New York on the weekends to visit friends who were leading vivid lives  in Manhattan while I languished away near the Mason-Dixon Line. Prakash, my date to the play, was a mover and a shaker, inventing software and living in a tiny studio apartment near the Village. I remember the Anne Frank evening well, but for an unfortunate reason. During the climactic scene of the play, when Anne and her entire family get carted off by the SS — a scene performed in stark silence to underscore its gravity — Prakash’s brand new cell phone rang L-O-U-D-L-Y in the audience. In that moment, I died inside. My memory is that Natalie Portman herself turned and glared at us. That maybe didn’t happen, but I’ll tell you what did: the audience was furious, and we barely escaped with our lives once it was over.

Unforgivable, yes. But in Prakash’s defense, cell phones were a brand new thing at this point. I didn’t have one, and when I heard his ring, I didn’t realize what it was at first. We weren’t all in the habit of turning our cell phones to vibrate or silent when seeing a play, and I doubt it ever crossed Prakash’s mind to wonder about the status of his cell phone ringer as the play began. At any rate, it was pretty humiliating, and I felt like a world-class asshole. 

Happy birthday, Anne Frank. And sorry, Natalie Portman.