Anne Frank play �And Then They Came for Me’ proves an emotional experience

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By Mary Louise Speer | Wednesday, March 29, 2006 12:21 AM CST | () comments

Larry Fisher/QUAD-CITY TIMES Augustana College student Christine Barnes portrays Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss, whose image is projected Tuesday behind her during a multi-media play entitled, “And Then They Came For Me; Remembering the World of Anne Frank.”

Pleasant Valley High School students connected emotionally with the people who were part of Anne Frank’s world Tuesday while watching a multimedia play titled “And Then They Came for Me.”

The presentation about two of Frank’s closest friends combines videotaped interviews and events filmed during the 1930s and World War II with performances by actors. Because they were Jewish, the Frank family went into hiding when the Nazis occupied Holland during World War II. They eventually were found and Anne Frank, then a teenager, died in a concentration camp.

“And Then They Came for Me” is being presented to area high schools by the Theatre Arts Department at Augustana College, Rock Island, and the Jewish Federation of the Quad-Cities. Augustana drama students Emily Chouinard, Christine Barnes, Nick Padiak and Jeff LaRocque play multiple roles under the direction of senior Susanne Kepley.

“There were people such as my father who thought this would blow over. ... Unfortunately, the group of people were wrong,” Holocaust survivor Ed Silverberg says in a taped interview that is part of the play. He was Anne Frank’s boyfriend and possibly the first person to realize her family had gone into hiding.

A video screen dominates the stage, and the full impact of the Holocaust horror comes through in the characters’ words. Eva Geringer Schloss, a friend of Anne Frank’s, and her family were captured by the Nazis on her 15th birthday. “I went downstairs to open my presents and they came for me,” Barnes says as Schloss.

Schloss’ mother, Mutti, married Anne Frank’s father, Otto, after the war. Barnes, a junior at Augustana, also portrays the role of Ed Silverberg’s mother.

“As an actor, you have to pay attention to playing multiple roles,” Barnes said. “I feel like I’m more personally connected to the stories because you get to meet those people through the characters we play and through their videotaped interviews.”

The Frank and Geringer families lived in the same apartment building in Amsterdam. In a taped interview, Schloss talks about the day she and Mutti were discovered in their hiding place. The two women were taken to Nazi headquarters and separated. The 15-year-old was beaten as the Nazis tried to force her into telling them who had sheltered them.

On the videotape, Schloss recalls them saying, “We intend to torture your mother to death unless you cooperate.”

“It was inhuman what the SS (Nazi secret police) did to the Jews,” Pleasant Valley freshman Justin Bright said afterward. If he had been alive in those days, Bright thinks and hopes he would have made different decisions than the Nazi followers did. “Definitely, I feel everyone needs to see this play,” he added.

Schloss and Mutti, played by Chouinard, were reunited with her father and brother during their train ride to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. There, the family was separated once again.

The characters of Eva and Mutti bow their heads in shame as they pretend to strip off their clothes while watched by concentration camp guards. “I can’t believe that they (the Nazis) did it to them when they were so young,” Pleasant Valley freshman Amy Fitzgibbon said.

“I thought it was really interesting the way they integrated the movie part of it and the acting,” freshman Zach Bozman said.

Freshman Kelsey Weindruch recalled reading “The Diary of Anne Frank” during Hebrew classes. “I feel I could have been friends with the characters. I’m Jewish, so I’m very interested in this subject, and I felt the play was a great way to show young people about the Holocaust. It kept me focused the whole time,” she added.

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