In January, a new house will go up in New York City—or rather, a replica of a house. A full-scale copy of the rooms where young Jewish diarist Anne Frank hid from Nazis during World War II is heading to Manhattan.
In July 1942, Anne Frank, then aged 13, her parents Otto and Edith, and her 16-year-old sister Margo went into hiding in the “annex.” Those four rooms were above Otto Frank’s workshop. The building is located on one of the historic canals in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The Franks were joined a week later by the van Pels family—Hermann, Auguste, and their 15-year-old son, Peter. Four months later, Fritz Pfeffer moved into the hiding place. They sought to evade capture by Nazi German occupiers.
Nazi soldiers discovered the Jewish refugees in 1944. They sent the residents of the annex to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. Later, the Nazis moved Anne and her sister Margot to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Both died of typhus in February 1945. Anne was 15.
Otto Frank was the only person from the annex to survive the Holocaust. After the war, he published Anne’s diary. It became a symbol of hope and resilience in the face of tyranny.
The rooms that form the heart of the Anne Frank House museum are being re-created in the Netherlands. They’ll be shipped across the Atlantic for a show titled “Anne Frank The Exhibition” at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan.
“For the first time in history, the Anne Frank House will present what I would call a pioneering experience outside of Amsterdam . . . to immerse visitors in a full-scale, meticulous recreation of the secret annex,” Anne Frank House director Ronald Leopold says.
“Anne Frank The Exhibition” opens on January 27. The opening coincides with International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The display will also trace the history of Anne’s family—from hiding in the annex and discovery by Nazis to deportation and the publishing of Anne’s diary.
“Our visitors will learn about Anne not just as a victim, but through the multifaceted lens of a life, as a teenage girl, as a writer, as a symbol of resilience and of strength,” Leopold says. “We hope that they will contemplate the context that shaped her life.”
About 125 exhibits are traveling from Amsterdam for the New York exhibit. These include photos, albums, and artifacts such as one of the yellow stars Jews had to wear in the occupied Netherlands.
Anne’s famous diary will not make the trip.
“We unfortunately will not be able to travel with the diary, writings, the notebooks and the loose sheets that Anne wrote. They are too fragile, too vulnerable to travel,” Leopold explains.
The exhibition is timely, the director says.
“With ever fewer, fewer, survivors in our communities, with devastating antisemitism and other forms of group hatred on the rise in the U.S. but also across the world, we feel . . . our responsibility as Anne Frank House has never been greater,” Leopold says. “And this exhibition is also in part a response to that responsibility to educate people to stand against antisemitism, to stand against group hatred.”
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. — 1 John 4:7-8
