Before she died of typhus at 15 inside the German concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, Anne Frank lived just over two years inside a secret 45-square meter (484-square foot) annex atop an Amsterdam home with her parents, sister and four others, all hiding from the Nazis.
That space — one of the most famous dwellings in history, thanks to Frank’s best-selling published diary and subsequent plays and films — can now be explored remotely in New York. Having toured both, I was no less moved by the recreation. Anne Frank The Exhibition brings you into their world and puts it in larger context.
The exhibit was originally set to run from January 27 (International Holocaust Remembrance Day) through April 30. But demand has been so high that the exhibit has been extended to October 31.
Visitors to New York’s Center for Jewish History near Union Square can take a self-guided tour of a detailed, full-scale recreation of the Amsterdam dwelling and get very close to its residents’ personal belongings and related exhibits.
It’s a moving journey that brings the massive, horrific scale of the Holocaust — in which approximately six million European Jews were murdered — down to the vibrant if cloistered life and shared experiences of just a handful of them.
Frank’s book, translated into more than 70 languages with over 30 million copies sold so far, reads like a nonfiction play at times. We get whole passages of absorbing dialogue, soliloquized observations, some stage direction and plenty of tense, claustrophobic scenes. And like some plays, the set is itself a character. Reading Frank’s famous diary conjures in the mind, as many readers know, a visual map of the annex’s layout.
Comparing one’s imagined annex is part of the appeal of visiting Frank’s actual secret annex home in Amsterdam, which has been open to visitors since 1960. When you visit, you may be struck by the size — bigger or smaller than you thought — or of the life-or-death significance of their hidden entrance behind a moving bookcase, or in the small universally human ephemera on display. So much life was lived there, even in seclusion.
Now you can have that experience in Manhattan, for the first time outside Amsterdam. It’s a unique opportunity to make Frank’s story accessible to US schoolchildren.
The meticulous recreation is bookended, so to speak, by exhibits.
One displays photos and the original objects belonging to the family (handwritten notes, luggage, a desk, a transit pass, etc), from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Another exhibit recounts the final chapters for the Annex’s residents and others.
It’s highly immersive in video, audio, photos 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 major Nazi concentration camps.
The rooms themselves are a vivid snapshot of both time and place.
There’s a Monopoly-type stock exchange board game called Het Beursspel in the middle of the table in the kitchen/dining area. A sock with yarn needles is suspended in mid-darn. As the audio loop explains, Anne shared a room with an older man who wasn’t a family member, and she put on their walls photos of early 1940s celebrities (Hollywood and royalty) to cheer the place up a bit. And then you look down at Anne’s desk and there it is, a child’s journal – plaid, fuzzy and with a lock. It’s a facsimile, but that book, this room, is what Anne saw, and it’s not a photo, not virtual.
I didn’t read “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” as a school-age kid. I hadn’t even read it when I toured the actual house in Amsterdam in my late 20s.
The story is famous enough without needing to. Instead, I read the surprisingly mature and bittersweet volume a few years ago, during the Covid lockdown. Not that the fear of that deadly virus was the same threat level as the Nazis. But there were still parallels in terms of isolation, not going to school or work, and the risk of human contact beyond the bubble of one’s family.
But what really struck me was Frank’s clear, ambitious and unintentionally prescient hopes for herself as a famous writer. As I toured her temporary home this time in New York, I recalled one of the few quotes I wrote down for myself when I read the book.
“I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people,” Frank wrote. “I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death!”
As heartbreakingly early as that death was, she got her beautiful wish.
You can buy tickets at AnneFrankExhibit.org. Audio guides are included with entry. David Allan is CNN’s Executive Editor for Features.
