Anne Frank and Me - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Nicole, a fifteen-year-old American high school student living in the year 2001, comes from an affluent household and takes her lifestyle for granted. She has a website she calls Notes of GirlX. On the website, she talks about her life and frustrations. Absorbed in her studies, she becomes fascinated with a Holocaust survivor who speaks to her English class, named Paulette Littzer-Gold. Nicole feels drawn to the woman, and asks if they have previously met. The class takes a trip to a local Holocaust museum. During the trip, Nicole and her peers are assigned roles as Jewish teens living during the Holocaust. After the activity begins, Nicole hears students shrieking and gunfire. She attempts to run along with the rest of her classmates, but is struck in the back while ascending a staircase and loses consciousness.

When Nicole wakes, she finds herself in Paris in 1942. She is told that she is Nicole Bernhardt, the name of the fictional Jewish girl assigned her by her English teacher back in the Holocaust museum. As months past, Nicole tells herself that the 2001 world is a dream and accepts that she is Nicole Bernhardt. Several of Nicole's friends are non-Jews who oppose Hitler's policies and protect the Bernhardt family. However, following the German invasion of France, Nicole's situation gets dramatically worse. Eventually, she is forced to hide in a rundown apartment in the streets of Paris. From her refuge, Nicole writes a string of anti-Nazi letters for the French resistance. In the letters, she calls herself GirlX.

The Bernhardt family is betrayed and Nicole is transported to Auschwitz and she meets Anne Frank aboard the train. Nicole remembers that she read Anne's diary and tells her, but Anne says she left it where she had been hiding. Later, a fellow Jew tries to save Nicole by sending her to be slave labor in the camp instead of being sent to be killed. Nicole and her sister Liz-Bette, who is very ill, are to be split up, Nicole to live and Liz-Bette to die. Nicole becomes hysterical and begs to be allowed to accompany her sister. The Germans, after mocking Nicole's devotion to Liz-Bette, allow her to go with the young girl. Nicole tearfully thanks them and then walks with Liz-Bette to the "showers." Liz-Bette is frenzied with terror, but Nicole calms her. Nicole then leads her sister in a Jewish prayer, as she whispers she loves Liz-Bette and they succumb to death.

Nicole wakes up, lying on a bench outside the museum. She finds out that other students had set off firecrackers which sent everyone running, when she bumped her head. Nicole stays at the hospital for a few days, and afterwards her life goes on, but she can't figure out if she was really in the Holocaust, or if it was just a bad dream. Nicole believes Paulette Littzer-Gold, the Holocaust survivor, who visited her school was the same woman at the Concentration Camp who told her to "stay to the right." The next day, Nicole finds out Mrs. Littzer-Gold had died overnight. She decides to go to Mrs. Littzer-Gold's funeral. Nicole sees a picture of her, but she looks nothing like the woman she thought she was. Nicole sadly accepts that she was never Nicole Bernhardt and that she never lived during the Holocaust.

After the funeral, Nicole looks at the things that belonged to Mrs. Littzer-Gold that are at the altar. She notices that a letter Mrs. Littzer-Gold owned was one of the GirlX letters that Nicole herself had written, back in Paris in 1942. The letter talked about how no one could silence her ( "her" being GirlX). Not only did Nicole find out she did lived in the Holocaust, but she gave Mrs. Littzer-Gold the courage to live. Nicole takes her sister to a museum about Anne Frank.