After being transported back in time to German-occupied WWII France, where she finds herself a member of the Bernhardt family, modern teenager Nicole Burns (Katie McKillop) – wearing the requisite yellow star marking her as a Jew – visits with ”boyfriend” Jacques (Alec Jenkins) in the Bernhardts’ apartment during the CHS drama club production, ”Anne Frank and Me.” Gini Davis/The Chronicle
CRESWELL – The first drama production of the school year was an ambitious undertaking in theme and execution, but students proved up to the task in presenting their thought-provoking play ”Anne Frank and Me,” directed by Creswell High School teacher and drama club advisor Gary Jones, on Jan. 9 and 11.
”Taking on the subject of the Holocaust (and Holocaust deniers) can be quite challenging, and the kids did a great job,” Jones said, adding that he’d become ”emotional” and had ”gotten goosebumps” even during rehearsals.
By turns humorous, serious and chilling, the play focuses on modern-day teenager Nicole Burns (Katie McKillop), who’s been assigned to read ”The Diary of Anne Frank” for a high school class but whose family isn’t convinced the Holocaust – the Nazi genocide of millions of European Jews and other ”undesirables” during World War II – actually happened.
”One of the most challenging parts about playing a character like Nicole was definitely her initial ignorance and, almost, indifference to the topic of the Holocaust,” McKillop said.
In the play, Nicole and her friends are more concerned with clothes, dancing and boys than finishing their schoolwork; but while unconscious after an accident, Nicole ”travels” back in time to 1942 Paris, where she finds herself part of a privileged Jewish family, the Bernhardts, and experiences firsthand what they endured between 1942 and 1944 under the German occupation.
Her sisters, friends, the boy she has a crush on – and even her teacher and school principal – all appear in her dreamscape, some as themselves, others in new roles. Like her real-life family, the Bernhardts exhibit their own form of denial: that the concentration camps are simply ”work camps” and mass extermination a myth – or that the roundups and deportations may ”only” be directed at ”foreign” as opposed to ”French” Jews, and that the family will be safe as long as they ”follow the rules.”
Of course, they are gradually disabused of these assumptions; Nicole’s Parisian ”father” – once a highly regarded doctor – becomes a resistance fighter, and Nicole, her ”mother” and sisters are forced into hiding.
In a cattle car on its way to Auschwitz after her father is killed and the family exposed and captured, Nicole encounters Anne Frank. Nicole stuns the girl by revealing knowledge of her diary – which Anne had left in her attic hiding place – and announcing she’s from the future; but when Anne begs to know what becomes of her, Nicole confesses she never finished reading the diary.
Finally, Nicole regains consciousness in a hospital in her own time, surrounded by her family and friends, and with a newfound understanding of the grim reality of the Holocaust and the unspeakable suffering of the Jews and other Nazi targets.
”The biggest thing I learned, in that respect, was to speak up and fight for the truth,” McKillop said. ”A piece of that history is going to live in me forever now that I have given my best efforts to portray it.”
Jones said he prepared for the production by reading ”The Diary of Anne Frank” and historical accounts of the Jews’ experiences in France during WWII, and McKillop was one of several students he involved in selecting and previewing the play.
Jones credited the student cast and crew for delivering an important, moving production: ”I have one word for them: wow!” he said. ”They came to shine, and that’s what they did.”
McKillop believes the intellectual and emotional demands of the play have left a lasting impression on those involved.
”I feel that everyone has built a deeper emotional bond with each other after all the time we have put into it. You can’t act out that experience night after night for hours on end and not be hit in the heart,” she said. ”There have been many laughs, hugs and tears shared between this cast, and I truly believe that we will never lose that connection with each other. This is our family.”
