Washington, July 9 (IANS) A ‘comic-book’ version of a biography documenting the life of Holocaust victim Anne Frank was launched Friday, with officials saying this was a ‘new way of telling the story and attracting new audiences’.
Designed by the renowned creative team of American writer Sid Jacobson and artist Ernie Colon, the 160-page illustrated biography depicts how Anne, then 13 years old, and her family were forced to go into hiding in Amsterdam to avoid persecution from the occupying Nazi forces, CNN reported.
During the Franks’ two-year hiding in a secret apartment, Anne penned a diary that charted the family’s perilous existence right up to the moment they were betrayed and arrested.
The new biography, now released in Dutch, will eventually be translated into English, German, Italian, French and Spanish, officials at the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam said.
The graphic biography uses cartoon drawings as well as text to relate Anne’s story, making connections between her life in hiding and important historical events during this period, they said.
The museum has previously published two fictional comic-style books set during the Holocaust that were particularly successful in schools in the Netherlands, CNN quoted museum spokesperson Annemarie Bekker as saying.
This prompted them to give Anne Frank’s story the same treatment using photographs of the family and the people that aided them from the museum.
‘Not everyone has read Anne Frank’s diary,’ she said. ‘The mission of the museum is to make the life story of Anne Frank accessible to as large an audience as possible, especially the younger generations.’
Following their arrest, the Frank family was sent to concentration camps, with Anne and her sister Margot eventually being transferred to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany, where they died.
Their father, Otto, was the only member of the family to survive the war, and he eventually returned to Amsterdam where he was given Anne’s diary by the people who had helped conceal them.
The American writers of the graphic novel had previously produced a similar illustrated account of what went wrong before and after the Sep 11, 2001 terror attack titled ‘The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation’.
