Can Anne Frank still inspire today's teens?

April 10th was Holocaust Remembrance Day. The page on my daily Peace calendar, the one my kids rip off each passing day, had the quote as:

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”  -- Anne Frank

I am the daughter of a German immigrant. Schoolyard bullies called me a Nazi when I had no idea what the word meant. So this annual remembrance comes with a bit of familial baggage.

My mother was a toddler during War War II in a small town in southern Germany. She didn’t learn about the horrors of the war until she was a teen herself, when she could mentally – or cognitively  – understand the scope of the tragedy. Her early memoires are of bomb shelters and American soldiers descending into her village with guns and chocolate bars.  She came to the US as a nineteen year old to begin a new life, like so many others of her generation.

The topic of the Holocaust was so sensitive in our household that my main education was watching documentaries about it. Of course, what remains silent in a family is often the trigger to want to know more. So the unfolding of my learning happened in steps over many years, including learning the German language, traveling abroad, visiting concentration camps, a trip to Israel, and reading Ursula Hegi novels among others pursuits.

But as the fabric of my upbringing blends into my way of being, I wonder now how a story like Anne Frank’s affects a generation of teens in a new century, who have no immediate history of the perils of war and genocide. The Boston Globe (April 10, 2010; Anne Frank, Typical Teen?) tried to get at this. Don Aucoin wonders if students might be missing something in Anne Frank’s story. One 14 year old boy is quoted: “Before the Nazis came in to where they lived, honestly, I’d say it was pretty similar to what most of us are going through. If I was in the same circumstance, hiding in a small space for so long, our [family] relationships would probably deteriorate in the same way.’’ I have to wonder, though, how contemporary teens understand the context of the story beyond the reflections of a teenager who is coming of age. Living in hiding might be uncomfortable, but the fear and reality of systematic murder and gas chambers is quite another. It is as if the story needs to be packaged with the brutal facts of what happened in the towns, villages and camps.

Well, maybe it’s just me. Or maybe I am sensitive to the fact the group perpetration happens in our backyards – on smaller scales. (Take the case of Phoebe Prince in South Hadley, MA, who hung herself over the staircase banister, after months of relentless, intolerable bullying due to being cast as different – a foreigner, a slut, or whatever epithets her teen perpetrators flung at her.  Aren’t the lessons of Anne Frank in here somewhere?)

On Sunday, 4/11, PBS’s Masterpiece Theater premiered The Diary of Anne Frank. Again, like so many years ago upon reading the diary as a child, the images filtered throughout my restless slumber.  I hope the program is something that schools will bring into their curriculum along with the book. Multi-media helps. Multiple perspectives do, too.

Listening to Ellie Kendrick, the actress who played Anne, is something any teen should listen to. She hadn’t read the story until after she was cast in the role at age 17. So her view is both fresh and contemporary. But acting requires you to place yourself fully in character – putting all sensory modalities into high gear. Not what most of us do.

The PBS website offers a video diary project… and here’s where the lessons learned filter in. Teens talking about making a change. There is also a Memory Project: Diaries and Portraits Program at the Anne Frank Center.  Opportunities abound for personal reflection. Anne Frank would be proud that her work could inspire so many – to take a single moment and improve the world.  Let’s hope her message really gets through.