Anne Frank annex replica opens Holocaust story to new generation

by Gregory WALTON

A replica of the annex where Jewish schoolgirl Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis will open in New York next week, targeting a new generation with the lessons of the Holocaust.

The recreation of the cramped hiding space shared by Anne and seven others at Manhattan's Center for Jewish History is the first replica displayed outside of Amsterdam, and will be free to visit for thousands of schoolchildren.

"They live in a different world. They have a very different media landscape around them. They are still very interested in the topic -- but know less about it," said Anne Frank House executive director Ronald Leopold.

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Unlike the Amsterdam museum, set in the building where Anne Frank hid from Nazis and wrote her diary during the Second World War, the New York iteration is furnished as it would have been in the 1940s.

Visitors are led through a bookcase like the one behind which Anne and her family hid from the Nazi occupiers after Anne's sister Margot received orders to go to a labor camp in July 1942.

The exhibition is brought to life largely with visual installations and uses minimal text narration. It relies instead on audio guides tailored to different age groups and interactive displays like a giant underfloor map of Europe and the Nazi Holocaust machinery.

"This is how we think, at this moment in time, you could bring the memory of the Holocaust across towards these young generations," Leopold said.

- Not just 'in the past' -

Mockups of the rooms used by Anne Frank and her family were recreated by an exhibition designer with experience of theater and opera using two scale models commissioned by Anne's father Otto Frank in the 1960s.

The daily struggle of living in hiding is illustrated with ordinary objects and photos including artifacts that belonged to Anne Frank, like the first diary book gifted to her on her 13th birthday on June 12, 1942.

Her diary has since been published in more than 70 languages with millions of copies sold.

It recounts her life as an ordinary teenager living in extraordinary circumstances up until her arrest along with everyone in the annex in August 1944 after 25 months in hiding. She died along with Margot in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945.

"Now young people (can) come here in this exhibition and get to know what it means to be in hiding, what it means to be persecuted," said Hannah Elias, granddaughter of Anne Frank's cousin Buddy Elias.

"This has a strong connection to the present, because there are still a lot of people that are persecuted or that might go into hiding, and to know that it's not just a thing in the past. It's not something that we can close a chapter and then not look at it again."

The exhibition opens to the public Monday to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp.

"The Anne Frank House feels that our responsibility has never been greater," said Leopold.

"This story is not just about the past. It's a reminder that is also very much a call to action for the present and for the future -- stand against anti-Semitism, stand against other forms of hate."