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. From January 27 (International Holocaust Remembrance Day) through April 30, 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 f.
