Frank story a graphic novel
A GRAPHIC novel version of The Diary of Anne Frank by the creators of the Oscar-nominated film Waltz with Bashir will roll off the presses next month, its publishers said yesterday.
Writer-director Ari Folman and illustrator David Polonsky – who made the acclaimed 2008 animated documentary about Israeli soldiers during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon – are also making a film about Frank and her story, to appear in 2019.
The diary the German-born Jewish teenager kept while hiding in an Amsterdam attic in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands until her capture in 1944, is one of the most-read books in the world.
Folman’s own parents were Holocaust survivors. “Anne and her family arrived at the gates of Auschwitz the same day my parents arrived there,” the filmmaker said.
Frank died of typhus in the German Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945, aged 15. The camp was liberated by British troops in April that year.
Israeli-born Folman said he realised it would be crucial to bring the story to a new generation.
“There is a threat that the things we have to learn [from the Holocaust] will not be taught and learnt if we don’t find a new language for them,” he said.
The Anne Frank foundation said the graphic novel would appear in nearly 50 countries next month, with publication in other languages to follow.