On April 13, 2014, an act of anti-Semitic gun violence erupted at the Jewish Community Center of Overland Park. The shootings began just outside the White Theater, while members of our theater community were preparing for a performance of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Three people were killed during the rampage: William Lewis Corporon and his grandson Reat Griffin Underwood were murdered in the parking lot, and later, Terri LaManno was murdered in the parking lot of Village Shalom.

Our whole community was shocked that our beloved Jewish Community Center could be the site of an such a murderous incursion. That couldn’t happen here, we thought.

But that sad and fatal day prompted us to decide that Kansas City Repertory Theatre had to revive “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

In the ashes of the Holocaust, Anne Frank’s diary was published by her father Otto Frank, the sole survivor of the family. The dramatic adaptation opened on Broadway in 1955 and went on to win a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Of all the literature of the Holocaust, “The Diary of Anne Frank” is particularly powerful because it provides an unfiltered perspective of a young girl’s life as she lived it in unthinkable circumstances. Anne Frank’s diary allowed one life to stand in for millions lost in the Holocaust, and has become emblematic of the promise Never Again in the struggle against genocide.

So why revive “The Diary of Anne Frank” in the wake of the JCC murders? In plays, actors create the illusion of the present moment. We know that actors are people pretending to be other people. The actor’s job is to convince us that they are not pretending. In reviving this play, for a short while Anne Frank lives with us.

Through the theater, we experience the present moment of a destroyed past. We see through her eyes, and realize that the world she inhabited was just as ordinary, beautiful and full of possibility as our own. Just as we have no idea what history will make of us, the characters in this story had no idea what tomorrow held. Living with them in this production allows us to experience their present moment with greater empathy and therefore understand our own.

Our own present is unfortunately resonant with the brief moment of Anne Frank’s life. We’ve all read the stories — families in Syrian towns under siege living in hiding, staving and surviving on soup made from boiled grass. Europe is once again at the center of a massive migration of refugees, and Americans watch with horror and fear from across the ocean. Presidential candidates seriously propose locking the gates of our nation again. What will we make of our historical moment?

As we imagine that we are in the company of Anne Frank and her family in 1941, I hope we can imagine with empathy the plight of the millions of dispossessed people around the world. Like Anne, they live with hope that in spite of everything, people are good. Like us, they live with the terrible uncertainty of what happens next.