“I can only cry out and implore, ‘Open wide. Let us out,’ wrote Anne Frank in what became the famous ‘Diary of Anne Frank” after its post-World War II publication. The teenage writer was one of 60,000 Jews who found home in Amsterdam, attempting escape from the Nazis, who eventually captured the city July 6, 1942, and began searching for them. Frank died of typhus at one of the death camps, Bergen Belsen, in early 1945, perhaps two months before the liberation of Europe by the Allies. Recently, David Ira Goldstein, who completed 26 years as artistic director of the Arizona Theatre Company in June 2017, returned to the Valley to direct an adaptation of the original Broadway play. The Anne Frank cast featured Naama Potok, daughter of author Chaim Potok, who was Edith, Anne’s mother. The play summons vigilance, self-evaluation and affirmation: “Hatred is a choice,” she says. “We can choose a different path.”
