Anne Frank put a human face on the horrors of the Holocaust, thanks to the gift of an autograph book she received for her 13th birthday on June 12, 1942. It was just a month before her Jewish family went into hiding from the Nazis in rooms in her father Otto Frank's office building.
Until they were betrayed to the Nazis, arrested and sent to concentration camps in 1944, Anne Frank skillfully wrote, in the red-and-green-plaid cloth book with a small lock, about her life in the attic. Despite her hardships, Anne's resiliency and luminous spirit shine throughout her lyrical prose.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, June 10, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 National Desk 1 inches; 48 words Type of Material: Correction
"The Diary of Anne Frank": An article in Tuesday's Calendar about the film version of "The Diary of Anne Frank" said that actress Millie Perkins, one of the movie's stars, is 71. Although many reference sources list her birth year as 1938, Perkins says she actually is 73.
Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945; only her father survived the concentration camp. After the war, he returned to Amsterdam and discovered her diary in the abandoned rooms. First published in 1947, her story made its way to America in 1952 as "Diary of a Young Girl."
Three years later, "The Diary of Anne Frank" opened on Broadway, winning the Tony Award for best play and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1959, George Stevens directed the film version, which was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won three, including best supporting actress for Shelley Winters.
This evening, Millie Perkins, who made her film debut as the effusive Anne; Diane Baker, who played her reserved older sister Margot; and George Stevens Jr., son of the director, and associate producer and second-unit director on the film, are featured guests at a screening of "Anne Frank" at the Skirball Cultural Center. On June 16, the 50th anniversary DVD will be released by Fox.
"We had a screening of it a while back and I was stunned how powerful it is and how really timeless it is in terms of filmmaking," says Stevens. "The Holocaust was not a word that was prominent then. This was really the first film, certainly the first big American film, about that subject."
His father had joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps and headed a film unit from 1943 to '46. Not only did the filmmaker capture the liberation of Paris, he also gave the world footage from the Duben labor camp and the Dachau concentration camp.
"He said, 'I had a 50-yard-line seat seeing men at their best and at their worst,' " says Stevens. "He said that in a way, this was his war film. It didn't deal with the combat he had seen, but it dealt with the substance of it and the era itself."
