Kristoffer Hayward & Kendra Pfeiffer
Staff Writers
“We were pushed off the train and then, as we were pulled to the right, we were told, ‘left is death’.”
The above quote was spoken by Sara Vise, the fictional friend of Anne Frank, in the play Through the Eyes of a Friend. The play is presented by the Seattle based theatre troupe Living Voices from the perspective of Sara Vise, a character based on a compilation of various Holocaust survivors. Pulled back to the Second World War, actress Katjana Vadeboncoeur portrayed a young girl who lost nearly everything during the Nazi regime in an emotionally charged performance.
Before the play began, a backstory was provided. Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933. He promised the people a better Germany, but later that year the Frank family fled to Holland. In 1935, the Vandenburg law was enacted. A result of this law was the use of color coded badges to identify specific groups of people. Citizens were required to purchase the badges and they were to be sewn on a specific area of each article of clothing. These badges had to be visible anytime a person was in public. The purpose of the badges was to label each individual as a “sub citizen” and others were encouraged to treat these people differently by shunning them, spitting on them, etc.
Jews were required to wear a badge with the Star of David on it. Other categories of people were represented by an upside down triangle of a certain color, but Jews could be marked twice. For instance, if a person was a Jew and a criminal, their badge contained a right side up gold triangle, in addition to the colored triangle indicating criminal.
Jews were not the only people targeted. Of the 12 million people who died during the Holocaust, the Jews accounted for around half. Hitler’s Germany was to be populated with the Aryan race, a made up term, comprised of blond hair, blue eyed, tall and athletic citizens. The color coding of the badges identified the traits undesirable to the new Germany. Undesirable meant not meeting the standards of the Aryan race. These traits included: Jew, emigrant, anti-social, homosexual, criminal, political and so on. Anti-social encompassed a wide range of offenses from disagreeing with Hitler to making a joke about him. It was even against the law to listen to the radio.
The mental hospitals and prisons were cleared out. Mental patients and prisoners were the first to be exterminated. People were deported to death camps, concentration camps. Citizens would receive notices, call up letters, telling them to report to a work camp. The notice did not indicate where the camp was located, but it was very specific regarding what the person was to pack and bring to the camp.
Margo, Anne’s older sister, received a call up letter when she was 16. This is what prompted the family to go into hiding. They hid in Otto Frank’s office building, with another family, for two years with the help of two of the partners and two secretaries. Eventually, they all were caught and arrested, along with the four that hid them.
The play begins with Anne and Sara in Holland, meeting for the first time at school. At first their life is idyllic; playing music, talking about movie stars and getting into mischief. Then people started disappearing, hitting close to home when their school teacher went missing. Anne and her family disappeared unexpectedly and Sara was distraught. Sara’s family had to go into hiding as well, but they had to separate. Sara was in hiding for two years by herself. She never saw her parents again. Sara and Anne were reunited at the Vesterborg concentration camp, where their work consisted of sorting through the belongings of people that had been exterminated; gold fillings, shoes, clothing, etc., They were eventually moved to Bergenbelsein, where the camp motto was “work makes you free”. They were transported by train in cattle cars, cold and crowded, with bodies on the floor of those who did not survive the journey. Anne and her older sister Margo became infected with typhus and eventually died, a short time before the camp was liberated by the Allies.
Otto Frank was the only one to survive. Anne’s diary, a birthday present in 1942, was in safe keeping with Miep Gies, one of the secretaries at Otto’s company that helped to hide the Frank family. She returned it to Otto at the end of the war. An abridged version of Anne’s diary was first published in 1947. In later years, the full contents of the diary was published.
Seattle theatre troupe, Living Voices, presented the play in a unique format. Presenter and actress Katjana Vadeboncoeur, in the role of the fictional Sara Vise, interacted with authentic big screen images of the Frank family, concentration camps and life during this time. Presenting the play from the perspective of a young girl made the subject matter more relatable to the audience. Katjana gave a fine performance, she is professional and talented, drawing the audience into the story as if they were experiencing it firsthand.
