PHILOS PROJECT
by Dexter Van Zile
April 6, 2015

A few nights ago, I stayed up late to finish reading the Everyman’s edition of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. I bought the book after visiting the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The museum featured a powerful exhibit on Anne Frank, her family and the people who tried to protect her. This brave Jewish girl spent two years with seven other people – including her parents and older sister – hiding in an apartment in Amsterdam in an effort to escape the Nazis who were occupying Holland. The exhibit explained how Frank’s family, originally from Frankfurt, fled from Germany to Holland in an effort to escape being rounded up by the Nazis. It also described how the rest of the world refused to give Jews protection from their murderers during the Holocaust…Reading Anne Frank’s diary in the light (or shadow) of current events is deeply dispiriting, but is exactly the type of soul work that we must engage in if we are to keep our civilization and our humanity. READ MORE

An excellent staging of The Diary of Anne Frank at Writer’s Theatre (Glencoe) has now been extended to August 2.