Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times

Foreground to background: Daniel Haley, Cory Miller, Ben McClung and Mattie Waters rehearse a scene from "And Then They Came For Me."

"And Then They Came For Me: The World of Anne Frank"

• Eva Schloss, who survived Auschwitz, will be on Mill Mountain Theatre's Trinkle Main Stage Tuesday through Sept. 30. Performances without Schloss will also take place in area schools in October. 342-5740; www.millmountain.org
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What was Anne Frank like as a little girl?

Was there even a hint that she might write one of the 20th century's most famous books before her death in a German concentration camp at age 15? Was she a serious child?

Eva Schloss, Frank's childhood playmate and herself a survivor of Auschwitz, has heard the questions a hundred times. She's bound to hear them again when she comes to Roanoke next week for Mill Mountain Theatre's Trinkle Main Stage production of "And Then They Came For Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank," by playwright James Still.

Schloss will answer questions after each performance. Holocaust survivors who live locally also will attend.

Still, a veteran playwright whose "Looking Over the President's Shoulder" has been performed at Mill Mountain Theatre twice, wrote this combination drama-documentary about Anne Frank's circle of acquaintances in Amsterdam a decade ago. There have been perhaps 500 productions and thousands of performances since then.

"It's a strange and interesting phenomenon," said Still of the play's appeal. "I'm proud of it. I don't pretend to understand it."

Mill Mountain Theatre's artistic director, Patrick Benton, called Still's play "first and foremost a great story. The fact that it is a true story adds to its relevance." He said Mill Mountain education director Pat Wilhelms, who directs this production, programmed it long before he arrived in Roanoke in May, but "it's a show that has been on my short list for some time."

Still met Schloss, who now lives in London, where she once ran an antique shop, while doing his research. Schloss not only wound up as a character in the play (portrayed here by Mattie Waters), but has attended productions around the world, answering questions and selling copies of her own Holocaust memoir, "Eva's Story."

"She is a force to be reckoned with," Still said.

First, the history, for those who may have forgotten. German-born Anne Frank ("Anna" to her friends), was living in Amsterdam with her family when they were forced into hiding by the Nazi's genocidal campaign against the Jews during World War II. For two years, they lived in a secret annex to an Amsterdam office building, never venturing outside, for fear of being sent to the death camps. Eventually they were betrayed and sent to Auschwitz, famous for its gas chambers, in which thousands of people died. Anne and her sister, Margot, avoided the gas chambers, but were later moved to Bergen-Belson concentration camp in Germany, and perished there.

For the two years that she was in hiding in Amsterdam, Anne Frank kept a diary. The account of her hopes and despairs, and the deeper drama of her own awakening as a writer and a young woman, has captivated readers around the world.

There have been other plays about Anne Frank, and even a movie. Still's work takes a different tack, focusing on the fates of those around her. After all, Still noted, 6 million Jews lost their lives during the Nazi Holocaust. "Anne's story is the most famous. But it's one of millions and millions and millions of stories, most of which are untold."

Still interviewed Schloss and another Frank friend, Ed Silverberg, for his play. (Readers of the diary will remember Silverberg as Anne's pre-hiding days boyfriend, whom she called "Hello.") Videotaped interviews of the two survivors are intertwined with the dramatic scenes in the play.

Still is the first to concede it's a strange approach. He and Schloss attended the first performance of the play together, at a theater in New Jersey. "I remember leaning over to Eva and saying to her, 'You know, this may not work.' "

He knows better now.

"If someone had told me when I wrote this play that I would still be talking about it 10 years later, I'd have said they were crazy," he said this week. "I really don't know why it works. I've just let it be its unusual self."

The story of Eva Schloss in many ways parallels Anne Frank's. Born in Vienna, Schloss fled with her family to Amsterdam after Hitler came to power, just as Frank's family had moved there from Germany. "Unfortunately, it wasn't far enough," she said. Schloss and Anne Frank were the same age.

Like the Frank family, Schloss' family went into hiding. Like the Frank family, they were betrayed. Schloss was sent to Auschwitz, where she remained nine months, until the Russian army freed the prisoners. Though she and her mother survived, her brother and her father did not. Schloss' brother, Heinz, was a musician who wrote poetry, she said. "He never had a chance at life."

Anne's father, Otto, was the only Frank family member to survive the camps. After the war, he married Schloss' mother, Fritzi. Schloss thus became her former playmate's stepsister -- though of course Anne, who had died of typhus in February or March 1945, never knew.

And what was the now-famous diarist like before she went into hiding for two years, effectively ending her life in the larger world?

"She was a very ordinary 11-year-old girl," Schloss recalled. Even at 11, Anna "was a big flirt. She liked boys. I wouldn't say she was a serious child. But she had two personalities," Schloss added, including the private one that emerges on the pages of her diary, and which most of the world never knew. After Otto Frank read his daughter's diary, "He said, 'I never even knew my own child.' "

As for Still's play, Schloss finds it "very, very powerful." During the first performances, she said, "I was in tears from beginning to end." On the other hand, "It's rewarding for me to bring some of my family back to life."

She said schoolchildren respond to the drama, which lasts about 70 minutes (though the focus is on her acquaintances, Anne Frank's character has a small part). Sometimes, Schloss said, the children are noisy until the curtain rises. "As soon as the play starts -- not a sound throughout the whole performance."

Schloss said she finds people more willing now to hear about the Holocaust than they have ever been. In the years after the war, she said, people only wanted to forget.

It's different now.

"We live in such a dangerous and damaging world, people want to know what went wrong" in the Holocaust, she said. "People are scared."