89,219 is the number tattooed on the forearm that a young man shows on camera. It displays it with pride. This is the grandson of Arianna Szörenyl. She is an old woman of energetic speech and transparent gaze with a rare facility to make herself understood, which is probably the best way to make herself loved. Her childhood story tells of Nazi concentration camps, of hunger, abandonment, hatred, pain, much pain, the worst imaginable of the human being. But also, and here the clarity of her eyes, of affection, of transmitted inheritance and, above all, of resistance. She, like Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard, Helga Weiss and sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci,He lived something similar to what the young German woman, confined for two years in an apartment in Amsterdam and who ended up assassinated in the Nazi camp in Bergen-Belsen at the age of 15, told once and forever in her famous diary. The difference, obviously, is that they survived and, with their own voice, continue to count it. They do it in the documentary Discovering Anne Frank. Parallel stories, which opens on platforms this Friday, by Italian directors Anna Migotto and Sabina Fedeli . The grandson at the beginning is good proof of the capacity of conviction and emotion in each of the stories. The tattooed number is the same as her grandmother's. Forever.

“We wanted to know if Ana's story told a thousand times and many others forgotten could tell something of what is happening now in the world in general and in Europe in particular. We are experiencing a strange boom in nationalisms, xenophobic attitudes towards refugees and rejection of immigrants. The extreme right is experiencing a regrowth that shows us that, at the end of the day, we continue to learn nothing, "says the first of the two filmmakers mentioned. She takes a second and corrects herself: «Actually, the original idea was simply to pay tribute to Ana on the occasion of what would have been her 90th birthday. And do it with the voice of other Anas . He was talking to them when we realized the opportunity of the matter. It was they who, from their experience and their relative fright at what is happening in the world right now, redirected, so to speak, the plot of the film ».

The documentary is structured around two axes. On the one hand, the actress Helen Mirren, from the perfect reconstruction by the Piccolo Teatro in Milan of the Anne Frank apartment, recovers fragments of both the original text and the experience of confinement itself. «You cannot compare what we are experiencing now with the coronavirus and that, but there is a thread that connects the two experiences. I think now the newspaper is better understood, "says Migotto. The other narrative thread is the one that follows a young woman played by the actress Martina Gatti across Europe and the traces left by that unfading suffering. "Ana wrote her life as a teenager can now do on a social network," continues the director. But there is something else: «The interesting thing is to discover again that we are not only facing the life of a teenager in an extremely cruel situation. We are also in front of a young woman who is able to interpret what is happening around her from a political point of view. I am convinced that today Anne Frank is Greta Thunberg or Malala Yousafzai. All three have discovered within them the power of rebellion. Racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or machismo are the same over time. Until today ».

The film is all a claim and a tribute to memory. The camera travels to the depths of the horror now turned into a museum while recounting injuries and offenses through photographs, footprints, scars and, of course, the tattoos of shame. Grandmothers, children, grandchildren and, of course, historians speak. Remembering is a tiring and annoying exercise. It requires reflection and understanding. To understand a period of crisis like the current one, there are two positions: bothering to understand and remembering to know where we come from, or the opposite: that is, letting forgetfulness take responsibility for blaming others for everything that happens to us. Hatred of the other is more comfortable than understanding » , reasons Anna Migotto, and Arianna, Sarah, Helga, Andra and Tatiana agree with him.

the other painted newspaper of the Holocaust

Of all the testimonies that 'Discovering Anne Frank' accumulates, orders and cleans up, few are as perfectly drawn as Helga Weiss. She, who was born in 1929 (the same year that Anne Frank) began to write her story in 1938. Shortly thereafter, she experienced the Nazi invasion confined to her home, since Jews were not allowed to go to school. In 1941, the entire family was sent to the camp that the Nazis made a model and propaganda. And there, in Terezín (or Theresienstadt), the girl documented everyday life with a firm hand. And with the same clarity that he drew the unconscious joy of a baby who refuses to be nothing more than a baby, even in the worst moments he managed to accurately describe the crudest and most incomprehensible of horrors. She lived there for three years until she was transferred to Auschwitz. Before getting into the car, he handed his uncle the pages of his diary and he took care to hide it among the bricks on the wall. Of the three thousand children who were sent from Terezín to the most famous of the places of extermination, only a hundred survived. Helga was one of them. He finally returned to Prague again at the age of 15. Then she studied art and much later, yesterday, she proudly shows each piece of her memory before the camera of Anna Migotto and Sabina Fedeli.

In accordance with the criteria of The Trust Project

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