Index – Culture – The world-famous book was presented as we have never seen it before

We know everything about Anne Frank, we read her diary, we saw her in a documentary film, her hiding place in a series, we were able to visit the museum in Amsterdam, where the public can also see the back tract where the teenage girl hid and crouched with her nine children.

The family of the German girl of Jewish origin moved from Frankfurt to the Netherlands after Hitler came to power, but the Germans also occupied the Netherlands in 1940. When Anne’s sister Margot received a summons to work in Germany in the summer of 1942, their father, Otto Frank, knew that this meant deportation, and to save his family, they hid in the back building of his company, where five others tried to find shelter besides them. This was successful for two years, but on August 4, 1944, based on an anonymous report, the Gestapo found them and took them all away. Anne and Margot died of typhus a few weeks before the liberation in Bergen-Belsen, their mother was destroyed in Auschwitz. Of the family, only Otto Frank survived the war, he later published Anne Frank’s diary.

Joy and suffering

In the diary, Anne wrote her fears, hopes and experiences, reacted to the effects on her, commented on the lives of those hiding with her. Details of these are also told in the Kassai National Theatre’s performance, but the story is performed and danced by the ballet company throughout – and after the performance, we get the feeling that it cannot be reproduced more honestly and authentically in any other genre. After all, both joy and suffering appear in bodily sensations, and dancers are the masters of depicting this.

At the beginning of the performance, we see the lives of the schoolgirls Anne and Margot, as they chase each other in their school uniforms, boys and girls, and even here the physical contact is strong: they fall, catch each other, fall down. The unbridled joie de vivre is put an end to by uniformed people, when they throw different bundles in front of them, which they have to put on – only when they are already dressed, do we notice the yellow star sewn on their chests. The next step is when they start taking people away, and the Franks hide with another family.

Narrowing space

The hiding place is represented on the stage by an iron structure and a cylinder-shaped chimney, where nine people are crowded. The great invention of the arrangement is that this iron structure standing on legs collapses over time: soldiers in Nazi uniforms arrive and from time to time take a piece out of the legs, so the space where you could walk upright at first becomes so narrow that you can only move bent over . All of this also symbolizes that the noose tightened around the two families, but also that the nine people had a hard time bearing the closeness, and indicates the

The constant threat is also made palpable by the fact that the house, that is, this iron structure, is constantly watched from the edge of the stage by the uniformed Nazis, they point spotlights at it, but the angels of death also appear in black hoods, marching silently. During the raids, the two families were able to squeeze into the chimney for a while, but after a while

The end is represented by the same chimney-like appearance, only horizontally, as the people are chased into it, who, now in prison clothes, crawl on all fours to reach the end of the cylinder with a metal grid – which also brought barbed wire and the chimneys of crematoriums to us – where they are then caught and spread out . Otto Frank is not the only one who does not go through the path of death, as he is saved in the end.

Screams and cries

The dancers tell the story in such a way that there is absolutely no lack of speech or text. Moreover, such shocking scenes are rarely seen on stage: the suffering of people who are afraid of being taken away and exposed to rudeness is presented with bone-deep authenticity, when family members clinging to each other are torn apart, pushed to the ground, and humiliated. The screams, the crying, the sobbing, the shouts all bring back the terrible age without the need for words.

However, the joie de vivre also appears in the hiding place, and this can also be best expressed through dance: on Anne’s birthday, or more precisely, at her bat mitzvah celebration, the same Yiddish folk song that was danced to outside, in the free life, is played. Anne’s diary and the imaginary friend to whom the entries were written, Kitty, are also represented by a dancer – in the same red and black checkered dress as the cover of the diary. At the end of the performance, one of their hiders gives the diary to the father.

A Hungarian parallel can also be mentioned for the dancing of the era: Éva Fahidi, who recently died at the age of 97, also presented the desires and memories of a little girl in her performance created together with Réka Szabó Salt flower – or The euphoria of existence with title. The performance was also made into a film.

From the program of this year’s MITEM a Seagull, Horses get shot, don’t they? the Mitikas peak (on top of Olympus) and the Anna Karenina we also wrote a review of the lectures.