‘Anne Frank’ miniseries to air ABC-TV to present powerful two-part drama May 20 and 21

Two-part miniseries, “Anne Frank,” airs 9-11 p.m. May 20 and 21

There’s a scene near the beginning of the extraordinary ABC-TV miniseries, “Anne Frank,” that shows Jewish bathers on a beach in Holland, savoring the final carefree days of peace before Hitler’s war machine swallows the tiny nation in an astonishing five days.

Suddenly, Otto Frank spies his friend, the dentist, Fritz Pfeffer, bussing his girlfriend, Charlotte Kaletta, and asks his wife, “Were we ever like that, Edith?”

“No, Otto,” Edith answers flatly, “we were never like that.”

Later, after the Frank family, Pfeffer and three other Jews are forced into hiding, Anne underscores the cold reality of her parents’ loveless marriage.

“I’ve seen the way you kiss her,” she blurts out to her father. “You kiss her the same way you kiss me and [older sister] Margot. I think you’re not in love with her.”

Annelies Marie Frank, as it turns out, may have been the Holocaust’s most famous victim, but she was no saint. By turns charming and crass, sweet and tart, she was a difficult young adolescent. Her famous diary, written during the 25 months she hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic, only hints at the range of her mercurial personality.

My own 35-year obsession with Frank’s saga, a result of my appreciation for personal stories from World War II, almost never developed. One day in eighth-grade English class, while searching for a book to read, I asked my teacher if I could borrow “The Diary of a Young Girl,” which pictures Anne on the cover looking so innocent and strangely attractive.

“You’re not going to read that?” the teacher lamented. “Only girls read that book.”

She finally relented, and I devoured Anne’s coming-of-age story in two sittings. Somehow, I thought, if Anne at 14 could persevere over life’s problems, so could I.

So imagine my surprise, all these years later, to learn from “Anne Frank,” the miniseries, that there is much more to the story than what the diary reveals. The teen-ager who wrote that people were basically good at heart was a much more complex girl than I had imagined.

The miniseries works so well as history and drama because of a strong script and fine performances. Hannah Taylor Gordon, a 14-year-old British actress, is Anne Frank, with her every puckish grin and pout. German actress Tatjana Blacher, impressive as Edith Frank, has little dialogue, but expresses her frustrations with arched eyebrows and watery eyes.

It is Ben Kingsley, however, who owns “Anne Frank.” Playing the girl’s beloved father, the man into whose arms she flies during the bombing of Amsterdam and after skirmishes with her mother, Kingsley’s understated performance is magnificent.

Here, for the first time, is the complete story, based on Melissa Muller’s 1998 biography, revealing far more of the families’ Jewish roots than prior productions conveyed; more about their rich lives preceding the terrible years in hiding; and, in the harrowing second half (parental discretion is advised), more of the Franks’ last months at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where most of the Jews from the Secret Annex perished. Only Otto, who died in 1980 at age 91, survived.

A powerful scene in Kirk Ellis’ incisive teleplay shows Otto returning alone to the annex after the war, finally realizing his daughters are dead, along with Edith, Pfeffer, and Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their 18-year-old son Peter (Anne’s one-time lover), who hid with him in the attic. Overcome with grief, Frank drops Anne’s writings, given him by Frank protector Miep Gies (lovingly portrayed by Lili Taylor), and collapses onto the floor.

You’d have to have ice water in your veins not to sob as I did while watching that moment. Or an earlier one that shows the Franks hurriedly packing to go into hiding. Otto embraces Edith and says, “We can’t live in the past, only the future.”

“Anne Frank” takes dramatic liberties with some aspects of the Franks’ saga, most notably speculating that the Jews in hiding were betrayed by a cleaning woman who worked in Otto Frank’s factory. Because of its candid portrayal of Anne, the program was not sanctioned by the Anne Frank Foundation in Switzerland. Consequently, executive producer Steven Spielberg abandoned the project, and the series was filmed entirely in Prague, where a set duplicated the actual attic. The program does not suffer from these deviations, nor from any actual diary passages read by its heroine.

The program’s final word is also its most powerful statement: That Anne was but one voice of the 1.5 million children murdered during Hitler’s “Final Solution.” For that reason alone, children are encouraged to watch all four hours of “Anne Frank” with their families, to ensure that never again will the voices of the young be silenced before their time.