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Anne Frank lived inside the German concentration camp Bergen Bilsen before dying of typhus at 15 Just over two years A secret 45 square meters (484 square feet) Adjacent to his parents, sister and four others, all hiding from the Nazis above the house in Amsterdam.
One of the most famous residences in history, thanks to Frank’s best-selling published diary and subsequent plays and films—can now be explored from as far away as New York. After visiting both, I was nothing short of entertained. The Anne Frank exhibit brings you into her world and puts it in a larger perspective.
From January 27 (International Holocaust Remembrance Day) to April 30, visitors to New York’s Center for Jewish History near Union Square can self-guide a detailed, full-scale recreation of the Amsterdam residence and meet its residents. Can get very close. ‘Personal Goods and Related Exhibits.
It’s a moving journey that brings to mind the massive, horrific scale of the Holocaust – in which nearly six million European Jews were murdered – if the lives were closed off and shared by just a handful of those experiences. Became active.
Frank’s book, which has been translated into more than 70 languages with more than 30 million copies to date, sometimes reads like a nonfiction play. We get whole sections of absorbing dialogue, soliquized observations, some stage direction and plenty of tense, claustrophobic scenes. And like some plays, the set itself is a character. Reading Frank’s famous diary in mind, as many readers know, a visual map of the layout of the Annex.
Part of the appeal is visiting Frank’s original secret annex home in Amsterdam, which has been open to visitors since the 1960s. When you visit, it can be bigger or smaller than you think – or her. The importance of life or death lies behind the moving bookcases of their hidden entrances, or in the small global humanities on display. Even in solitude so much life was lived.
Now you can experience it in Manhattan for the first time outside of Amsterdam. This is a unique opportunity to make Frank’s story accessible to American school children.
Through exhibitions, complex entertainment is promoted, so to speak.
One displays photos from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and original items belonging to the family (handwritten notes, belongings, a desk, a transit pass, etc.). Another exhibit chronicles the final chapters for Annex residents and others.
It is highly scalable in video, audio, images and maps. In one room you walk on a glass floor with a bas-relief map of Europe under your shoes, red-orange flags marking the large Nazi concentration camps.
The rooms themselves are a clear snapshot of both time and space.
In the middle of the table in the kitchen/dining area is a Monopoly-type stock exchange board game called Hat Barspool. A sock is suspended in mid-daran with yarn needles. As the audio loop explains, Anne shared a room with an elderly man who was not a family member, and she painted their walls from the early 1940s to liven up the place a bit. . And then you look over at Ann’s desk and there, a baby’s journal – with plaid, fuzzies and locks. It’s a facsimile, but this book, this room, is what Ann saw, and it’s not a picture, not a virtual one.
I didn’t read “Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl” as a school-aged child. I hadn’t even read it when I visited the original house in Amsterdam in the late 20s.
The story is famous enough without needing to be. Instead, I read a surprisingly mature and bittersweet volume a few years ago, during the Covid lockdown. Not that the fear of this deadly virus was the same level of threat as the Nazis. But there were still parallels in terms of isolation, not going to school or work, and the threat of human contact outside one’s family bubble.
But what really struck me was Frank’s clear, ambitious, and unintentionally early hope as a famous writer. When I visited his temporary home in New York this time, I remembered one of the few quotes he wrote for himself while reading the book.
“I don’t want to be useless like most people,” Frank wrote. “I want to be useful or enjoy all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to live even after my death! ”
As heartbreaking as the death was, she got her beautiful wish.
You can buy tickets annefrankexhibit.org. Audio guides are included with entry. David Allen is CNN’s executive editor for features.
