Always one of my favorites. Every year that I teach this play I get something more from it. I understand something more about the characters, about their portrayals, about Anne's maturity over the course of the play, about their constant and nagging worry... Every year after finishing the play I go home and keep silence for the rest of the day because it is absolutely devastating to commit myself so fully to being a memory keeper of Anne's story and of the tragic events of the Holocaust. 8th grade students always have a staggering amount of questions and outrage after finishing this play. But as important as it is to explore the valleys of our past, I can't leave my students there. I have to find a way to pull them back up to more level emotional ground. That gets harder for me to do each year as we have more neo-Nazi visibility, more religious-based hate crimes, and internment on our own boarders.
Anne's story and her words are just as relevant for us Americans today as they were for the world when she wrote them so many decades ago.