Sixty years ago in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, it never would have occurred to us that The Diary of Anne Frank would still be a relevant theme for a political cartoon (“Back to a Dark Age,” Pat Bagley) so far in the future.
My first reading of the Anne Frank story was closer to seventy years ago, but in January 1960 my wife-to-be (we didn’t know it at the time) and I were in a college production of the theatre version in Wisconsin. (I was the bad guy who stole food.) The first act ended with a Jewish hymn that was so emotionally fulfilling that my mother-in-law-to-be went home, thinking the play was over.
In 1964 I led a theatre performance tour to Western Europe which played at the University of Amsterdam. On our day off we visited the sealed-off rooms where Anne Frank, her family, and four other people hid from the Gestapo from 1942 to 1944, and where she wrote her diary. In 1966 I did my own production as a community theatre director in Kansas — far enough south to have a white town and a Black town.
Sixty years later I find myself living in an America with a racist, sexist and homophobic government that justifies imprisoning and deporting people on the basis of the shade of their skin and the language they speak. It makes me wish for the optimism that we can read in Anne Frank’s last diary entry.
“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
Richard Scharine, Salt Lake City