As guards onstage pounded at the prop door, Cyrus Bostwick learned just how real Anne Frank’s fear was. As a freshman at Hickman High School herself, Bostwick understood that Anne Frank was, after everything, just a teenager.
“I feel like part of it is how much I identify with the character and how much I become her, and became her, during this,” Bostwick said. “Which meant that I could react in real time because we are portraying real people.”
"I could react in real time because we are portraying real people."Cyrus Bostwick
The Columbia Public Library is hosting “Americans and the Holocaust,” a traveling exhibit from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. As one of several events accompanying the exhibit, Hickman students performed scenes from their spring play, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” connecting the exhibition’s broader conversation about knowledge and responsibility to the impact of local voices.
The event, titled “Acting Courage,” was held Wednesday in the library’s Friends Room.
After the performance was a discussion from the student actors about the process of getting into character and the emotional weight that comes with performing such a notably harrowing piece of history.
The audience’s questions reflected the pervasive theme of both the play and the exhibit: the power within a people’s voice in the face of mass injustice.
Alyce Turner, a former social studies teacher and daughter of two Holocaust survivors, said the themes of the play felt poignant in today’s socio-political climate.
“Using our voices is what we have today,” Turner said. “And it’s really important that we do it in a play like this, in their school, in their community. We have to use our voice.”
Exhibit visitors are not just learning about history — they are stepping into it, asking what courage looked like during World War II and what it demands now.
Together, the exhibit and performance ask not only what Americans understood at the time, but what communities choose to do when confronted with injustice. The students of Hickman chose to display their solidarity through acting, relating themselves to the experience of living through political tension as a teenager.
The students performed the revised version of the play, which Bostwick said emphasized the characters’ imperfections and humanity, portraying Anne as someone able to find joy in everything, not just as a flawless symbol.
“Obviously, we are not in a situation like this, but there are still bad things happening to us, to people in the world, and we can still find joy,” Bostwick said. “And we should still work to find joy, work to find escape, or comfort in any way that we can, because there are devastating things happening. But there are also beautiful and exciting, gorgeous things happening.”
Hickman junior A.J. Thompson, who played Miep Gies, a Dutch citizen who helped hide the Frank family, said the play holds a contemporary relevance that is impossible to ignore and that her decision to be a part of the production was her own form of protest.
“It reminds me of my privilege and the fact that I am not experiencing any of the evils and awfuls that are happening in the world right now,” Thompson said. “And that I have all these resources and all this time and this space to be free and to use that to the best of my ability, to help those that I see, to help those that I know that are in need.”
Seth Smith, Columbia public services librarian, hopes the audience walks away drawing a connection between the American reaction to the events of the Holocaust and the treatment of vulnerable communities today.
“It’s a bittersweet tale of, you know, how the doors just completely shut on some of the most vulnerable people in the world at the time,” Smith said.
The exhibit started Monday and runs through March 16, with events alongside it that recount the larger reality of American knowledge of Nazi persecution during the Holocaust. Find more information on the Daniel Boone Regional Library website.
