Though it took some time for the Holocaust to make its way onto the stage, there was one notable exception, a play based on a diary written by a young German girl who spent over two years in hiding in Holland. Her name was Anneliese Marie Frank. Her story was not a product of memory, at least not the story told within the pages of her diary. It was a contemporaneous account, though even she went back to refine it somewhat. But the ending of that story, an ending not part of the diary or the eventual stage presentation, is a product of the overlapping memories as those who travelled with her or encountered her as she was sucked ever deeper into the abyss of the camps, tried to recall those moments in later life, reading back through a knowledge of her new-found significance. In some sense the later story would seem to annul if not the diary then the mood and resilient confidence of a girl whose imagination and emotions pulled her towards the future, who was confident of her own inner strength and the possibility of some ultimate triumph.

For many, her account would contribute the most affecting and accessible approach to the Holocaust. For others, it would offer a misleading source of sentimentality, not because it failed to tell a deeply moving story of someone at the beginning of her life, unaware that there would be no tomorrow, but because it enabled the reader to celebrate her life precisely because we are spared the appalling squalor, pain and despair she would come to know and which linked hers with the fate of others who were not allowed the period of remission granted to her, being sped to their deaths without even temporary respite.