‘Anne Frank: The Whole Story’ at 25 - A Testament to Never Forget
There is a detail about Ben Kingsley’s preparation for his role as Otto Frank in Anne Frank: The Whole Story that has stayed with me ever since I first learned of it.
In a 2011 interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kingsley revealed that during production, he kept a photograph of Anne Frank in his coat pocket. Before filming each scene, he would look at it and say, quietly, to the girl in the picture: “I’m doing this for you.”
It is the kind of detail that tells you everything about what this miniseries was trying to be: an act of witness that understood with complete seriousness the weight of the story it was being entrusted to tell.
25 years ago today, Anne Frank: The Whole Story premiered on ABC as a two-part television event directed by Austrian Jewish filmmaker Robert Dornhelm. It went on to receive eleven Emmy nominations, most notably winning the Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries. It received a Peabody Award. Critics received it with near-universal acclaim. During the years that followed, it became a common staple of Holocaust education in schools across the country – one that a generation of teenagers often encountered in classrooms at roughly the same age Anne Frank was when she began writing the diary that would eventually be read by tens of millions of people around the world.
The most famous screen adaptation of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl remains director George Stevens’ 1959 film The Diary of Anne Frank, an Academy Award-winning production that hewed closely to the first-person perspective of the diary itself, presenting Anne’s experience largely as she recorded it – from the inside of the secret annex, through her own eyes and in her own voice. It is a work of genuine power and considerable restraint. What it cannot provide, almost by definition, is the full picture. The diary ends with Anne’s final entry on August 1, 1944, three days before the Gestapo arrived. What happened after – the arrest, the deportation, the concentration camps, the deaths – exists outside the diary’s frame. Stevens, working from the stage adaptation, could only gesture toward it.
Dornhelm’s miniseries, by contrast, offers a more comprehensive depiction of Anne Frank’s story. Drawing primarily from Melissa Muller’s 1998 biography Anne Frank: The Biography, supplemented by original research and interviews by screenwriter Kirk Ellis, Anne Frank: The Whole Story was conceived as a fuller account than the diary alone could support. It shows us Anne’s life before the annex – her friendships, her first crush on a boy named Hello Silberberg, and the progressive tightening of Nazi restrictions that preceded the family’s desperate concealment. It shows us the annex itself, and the other families who shared it: Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their son Peter, and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer. And then, in its second half, it does what no major screen adaptation had previously done with the same sustained attention: it follows Anne and her family through what came after the diary ended. The arrest. Auschwitz. The separation of Anne and Margot from their father. The deportation to Bergen-Belsen. Anne’s and Margot’s deaths from typhus in the early spring of 1945, just weeks before the camp was liberated.
This decision to elaborate on so much detail was the miniseries’ greatest contribution, but also led to some controversy. The Anne Frank Foundation – the foundation established by Otto Frank to steward his daughter’s legacy – declined to endorse the production, as it had declined to endorse the Muller biography on which it was largely based. The foundation’s position was that Muller’s theory about the identity of the person who betrayed the Frank family to the Gestapo was not established with sufficient certainty to be presented as historical fact, as the identity of the betrayer has never been definitively established. The foundation’s non-endorsement ultimately meant that the production could not use any exact lines from the diary itself – a notable constraint for a story so defined by the voice of its central figure.
Hannah Taylor-Gordon, who has since retired from acting, carries the production on her shoulders with a skill that consistently exceeds the limitations of what primetime television in 2001 could fully accommodate. Her performance in the miniseries’ first half captures Anne’s irrepressible vitality – the intelligence, the humor, the adolescent intensity that made the diary such an extraordinary document of inner life – and her work in the concentration camp sequences is something else entirely: a piece of acting that makes no attempt to soften what is happening and asks the audience to bear witness with the same unflinching attention. Kingsley’s Otto Frank is equally indispensable. The epilogue, in which Otto receives his daughter’s diary as the last surviving member of his family, is one of the most devastating sequences the miniseries produces – the dedication Kingsley brought to the role, photograph in pocket and promise made before each take apparent in every frame.
There are, to some degree, the common limitations of American television productions of this era dealing with World War II – constraints of medium and format that great films like Schindler’s List were not subject to. But what the miniseries gets right far exceeds such limitations. Most notable is its refusal to dehumanize anyone, even the perpetrators. Evil that wears a human face is harder to look at – and more important to look at – than evil that has been safely othered into something we could never recognize in ourselves.
That Anne Frank: The Whole Story is not as specifically remembered today as its initial reception might have predicted is not a reflection of its quality. It is a testament to the magnitude of the story it was telling – the reality that any adaptation of Anne Frank’s life, however accomplished, ultimately becomes subsumed into the larger cultural memory of the diary itself, and of the six million Jewish lives lost in the Holocaust, among them one and a half million children. Anne Frank became a voice for all of them. The works made in her name, however significant in their moment, eventually become simply part of the ongoing effort to keep that voice audible.
That effort has never been more urgent than it is now.
We live in a time when oppressed minorities are being targeted and taken against their will by those in positions of political power. A time when genocides continue to be perpetrated abroad while the world debates the appropriate level of concern. When the lessons that Anne Frank’s diary has been teaching for over 75 years are being tested by circumstances that would have been, to previous generations, unthinkable.
The stories we tell about the Holocaust are not mere history lessons. They are warnings. Now more than ever – never again must mean something.
Anne Frank: The Whole Story is available on DVD and can be found online. 25 years later to the day, it is still, and always will be, worth revisiting.
This piece was written in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month. If you would like to donate to organizations dedicated to stopping genocide: