"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
That is one of the most frequently quoted lines from the Diary of Anne Frank.
She died in 1945 at age 15 in a Nazi concentration camp, after two years in hiding with her family and four other individuals in a secret annex behind her father's business in Amsterdam.
Her diary, published after her death, is one of the most famous first-hand accounts of Jewish life during World War II.
A one-person play that debuted Off Broadway last year offers a tantalizing bit of speculation: If Anne Frank had lived to adulthood, would she have kept the same hopeful outlook about human nature?
Anne Being Frank runs this weekend at three venues in South Florida.
The one-person drama takes place in three worlds: the Frank family's secret hiding place, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where Anne actually died and an imagined future where Anne survives the war and pitches the manuscript of her diary to a New York City publisher.
Australia-born actress Alexis Fishman, who plays Anne and an assortment of other characters in this alternate reality, has a strong personal connection to the Holocaust.
"I'm the grandchild of four Holocaust survivors, which is relatively common for a Jewish Australian," says Fishman.
Like many other European Jews, Fishman's grandparents emigrated to Australia via Israel after the war.
"My friends that I grew up with all had a similar history," she says.
South Florida-based actor, director and playwright Avi Hoffman, whose nonprofit YI Love Jewish is co-producing the show, also has Holocaust survivors in his family.
"My Dad passed away in 2001, and he survived Auschwitz," says Hoffman.
His mother, Miriam, was born in a labor camp in Siberia. She spent her early adolescence in what Hoffman calls the "post-war chaos."
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Miriam and her family walked from Poland to a displaced persons camp in Germany. In 1949, the family arrived in the United States, where Miriam would go on to become a renowned Yiddish language playwright, author and lecturer.
Anne Frank, had she lived, would be 95 years old today. In the face of increasingly turbulent times, what advice would she give the world on how to solve its problems?
"Confront hate, confront evil and stand up to it where you can," says Fishman.
The opening performances of Anne Being Frank here in South Florida will coincide with the 86th anniversary of the event known as Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass.). That was when Nazi Party officials set off a series of violent pogroms against Jews in Germany and Austria in November, 1938.
The violence is widely considered a starting point for the Holocaust, in which Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews.
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"Anne Being Frank"
by Ron Elisha
Directed by Amanda Brooke Lerner
Starring Alexis Fishman
Miami-Dade
Saturday, November 9th at 8 p.m.
The Aventura Arts & Cultural Center
3385 NE 188th Street, Aventura
Palm Beach County
Sunday, November 10th at 8 p.m.
The Kravis Center
(The Rinker Playhouse)
701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach
Broward
Tuesday, November 12th at 7:30 p.m.
Rose & Alfred Miniaci Performing Arts Center,
3100 Ray Ferrero Jr. Blvd., Davie.
For ticket information, visit yilovejewish.org/events.
