TWO big doses of female bravery dominated the airwaves this week.

Holocaust victim Anne Frank (C4, Easter Sunday and Monday) could be measured against today's muscled marvels of womanhood in World's Strongest Women and Superwoman (BBC1, Easter Monday and Wednesday). It's an unfair comparison, of course.

I'd back my wife against any car-lifting superwoman when it comes to organising three warring children and a perplexed husband for a start.

She was hooked by Wednesday's look behind the scenes of the World's Strongest Woman contest and quickly summed up the efforts of champion Texan Jill Mills to retain her title.

As Mills sprinted up the road outside her house, towing a heavy metal weight, she announced: "I bet her neighbours really love listening to that every day."

It's difficult to accept that Mills' superheroine-style frame and bustline has developed entirely naturally, but she sets the standard that faced Ayrshire nurse Jacky Young and tiny Irish professional bouncer Trish Porter.

Young was so desperate to compete in Kuala Lumpur that she was prepared to arm wrestle an Asian restaurateur's gigantic young son for sponsorship money.

She won that encounter and went on to finish runner-up to Mills, whose husband admits he'd be staring open-mouthed at his wife as well if he wasn't married to her.

Mills speculated that men who fancied her would probably question their sexuality anyway. That tends to put this sport into the freak-show category.

"I wonder if all that muscle is going to turn to fat when they get older?" mused my wife with a wicked glint in her eye.

In a world without ethnic cleansing, half of my family would be called Janovski instead of changing their name to Jones to become more British after emigrating from Eastern Europe.

Attempts to establish links with my Jewish ancestry are as difficult to find as the warehouse doorway which hid the Frank family for so long in Amsterdam

. My mother does not discuss the subject. Is it guilt, relief or the torment of what might have been that attracts my attention whenever the story of Anne Frank is re-told or the wartime suffering of Europe's Jews is laid bare?

The two-part tale on Channel 4, starring Hannah Taylor Gordon as Anne and Ben Kingsley as her fatalistic father Otto, wasn't based on Anne's famous diary, but on a book by journalist Melissa Muller.

The result was a whistle-stop run-through of the events leading up to the Frank family going into hiding and the gruesome fate of the diary-keeper revealed.

Until now, TV and theatre versions have left the horrors of the concentration camp to our imagination.

I know my wife found sleeping difficult after Muller's version took us to the bitter end. I asked if she would have gone into hiding like the Franks. "No, I'd have made a run for it," she replied. And I bet she'd have outpaced Jill Mills in the process, with or without the family in tow.

Published: 26/04/2003