Bringing the Secret Annex to New York, and the world

The kids look like normal little kids: Some are exposed to the camera; some stare a little; others seem lost in consciousness. A thin, dark-haired girl in a pale dress looks prematurely mature.

She was Anne Frank, and this classroom photo, taken at a Montessori school in Amsterdam in 1935, appears twice in “Anne Frank the Exhibition,” a 7,500-square-foot multimedia installation that opens on Monday — International Genocide Remembrance Day — for one. a three-month stay at the Center for Jewish History in New York before moving on to other cities.

Visitors can first see the pictures in the exhibition’s introductory room, before going to the core of the show: the first full-scale creation of the secret annex where eight Jews hid in Amsterdam, including the Frank family. , since July. 1942 to August 1944. Anne wrote her famous diary in these cramped and confined spaces.

When the viewer encounters the nursery rhyme again, this time as an animation, it creates a tragedy: When an audio recording reveals his name, his age when he died and the place where he was killed, 10 of the Jewish children in the class, each. , turn into black silhouettes and disappear from the picture, their images erased as quickly and as quickly as the Nazis ended their lives.

Appears after annex, this cartoon introduces “a very personal, intimate, heartbreaking element of school children who were killed for reasons other than their Jewishness,” said Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House. in Amsterdam, while he was walking. cables and boxes during the construction of the New York show.

Created by the Anne Frank House and presented in collaboration with the Center for Jewish History, the entire installation aims to examine the life of Anne Frank – and her death – with a background rarely seen in the other treatment of this chapter of history. And while Leopold said the current political climate did not inspire the exhibit, it opens as antisemitism rises in the United States and abroad, and as the visual media turn to American popular culture to construct the memory of the Holocaust: an inspired novel. such as the television mini-series “We Were the Lucky Ones” and the movie “The Survivor” and recent award-winning fiction films such as “The Brutalist” and “A Real Pain.”

“Anne Frank the Exhibition” is the Anne Frank House’s answer to “how this story, how this memory enters the 21st century,” Leopold said.

Following the passage of time, the placement of Anne and her family begins in the 1920s in Frankfurt, Germany, via a flight to Amsterdam. It is only after exploring this original story that visitors encounter the reconstructed annex: five shadowy rooms whose dimensions and details were taken by the exhibition team from where it comes from in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, right down to the shuttered windows and plastered walls. .

The show continues the story of the Auschwitz return of Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the only survivor of the eight secret Jews. Visitors can see how Otto knew the fate of his wife and two daughters and how he pursued the publication of Anne’s diary: 79 editions in different languages ​​are on display, together with memories from theater and film adaptations. He also ensured the security of the annex in Amsterdam, where the museum is located and receives 1.2 million visitors a year.

“We all know that the diary is about two years of hiding,” said Tom Brink, head of collection and presentation at the Amsterdam house and curator of the traveling exhibition, in an interview. “But of course the story is much bigger than that. It starts early, it ends later, and the whole story and the whole journey is worth telling.”

Working with exhibition creator Eric Goossens, Brink faced the challenge of telling this story more than 3,600 miles away from the actual annex, set behind the canal house where Otto’s company was run. Frank. In Amsterdam, the annex is completely empty except for some props on the walls, including Anne’s pictures of movie stars and art.

Otto Frank asked that the space, which he robbed the Nazis, remain empty, which proves his deep loss. But using his and other accounts, the New York exhibition team filled each additional room with furniture and possessions, including books and board games taken from the original location.

“Otherwise it’s just four walls,” Brink said. “In Amsterdam, it’s just four walls, but it’s more than four walls. It means that you are in a real place. That is not the case here.”

Re-creation, however, can be controversial. Dara Horn, a novelist, essayist, argues that the Anne Frank exhibition inevitably denigrates and censors the girl’s memory, turning her into a symbol of easy exaltation.

Agnes Mueller, professor and fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of South Carolina and fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, has a similar problem. “My theory is that when Otto Frank wanted the annex to the original Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, he was concerned about this kind of commercialization and confirmation of Anne Frank’s personality. , and so he emphasized the absence as a way of representing what cannot be replaced. Seeing an extra room full of movement at home, he added, “can make us to feel good too much for what we shouldn’t feel.”

Many things in the renovated annex, however, are poignant, because they reveal the hopes of its inhabitants for an unfulfilled future. Anne Frank, 13 years old when in hiding, took her diary — a facsimile is here; the original remains in Amsterdam – and Peter van Pels, the young man who won his heart for a while, took his cat (a model of a pet carrier in the built space) and his bicycle (also a production). In her parents’ room, her mother, Auguste, hangs a black party dress, an original artifact that has never been on display and is now on display.

Mueller agreed that an annex full of artifacts might have more impact on younger viewers than an empty space. Because the exhibition, which he did not see, is intended to bring the history of the Holocaust to future generations – more than 250 school trips have already been recorded – it may lead “to a better understanding of what could have caused the Holocaust,” he said. (Americans lack knowledge about these events; a 2020 survey of millennials and members of Generation Z revealed that nearly half could not name a concentration camp or Jewish ghetto during the Nazi era.)

The show doesn’t skimp on horror. Although Anne’s smiling portrait is at the door, the exhibit’s narrator — along with the ticket — begins by giving the story’s unhappy ending: The Nazis found the people there of the annex and they were arrested.

Containing more than 100 original artifacts, the installation includes quotes from the Franks, along with items from their own history: furniture, friendship albums, letters, Torah. The exhibition hall tells the story of the political climate of the 1920s and ’30s. Pictures of Nazi rallies in 1938 appear repeatedly on the walls, the happy participants being young women no older than Anne and her sister Margot.

Another entrance hall recreates the atmosphere of Amsterdam in 1940-42. In continuous rotation, films and photographs cover the walls, interspersing scenes of family life with images of Jewish rallies, deportation trains and anti-Jewish regulations that “kept coming and going.” keep coming,” said Brink.

the The annex is behind the production of the bookcase that covered the entrance. After leaving the renovated hideout, visitors walk through a glowing glass floor covering a full map of Europe, with the location of every death camp or mass killing of Jews marked with small flags. . One wall sees Bergen-Belsen, where Anne and Margot died in February 1945 — just months before Germany surrendered; Other panels show images of mass rallies, concentration camp inmates, Nazi shootings, the Warsaw ghetto. At the bottom of this gallery, the nursery pictures go through repeated changes.

“The evocative element of this exhibit really takes people back in time and place,” Leopold said, especially young visitors.

To attract these audiences, the exhibit, a non-profit enterprise that supports the mission of its two partners, offers $16 tickets for visits to those under 18 each week. public school trips, but also for those from schools across the country that receive federal funding (Title 1).

“The goal is to have 250,000 students walk through the exhibit,” said Michael S. Glickman, founder of jMUSE, an arts and culture consulting group, and consultant to the exhibit. Through online resources, he added, “our hope is that we’ll be able to support another half a million students in the classroom.”

The public program will also offer an additional perspective on Anne Frank for adults, whether “the discussion of the 1955 play, or the film ’59, or the today’s political debate about his legacy,” said Gavriel Rosenfeld, president. of the Center for Jewish History. Author Ruth Franklin (“The Life of Anne Frank”) will be interviewed at the center on Tuesday evening, and novelist Alice Hoffman (“When We Fly”) will appear on February 9. a series of articles. (Expanding the show to New York is under consideration; more locations will be announced in the spring.)

The mission is to support the memory of 10 kindergarten classmates and the other 1.5 million Jewish children whose lives were taken away by the Holocaust. Leopold said he hoped the show would inspire participation and reflection.

“If this exhibition does something, it’s not just teaching history,” he said. “It also teaches us about ourselves.”

Anne Frank the Exhibition

Jan. 27-April 30, Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, Manhattan; 212-294-8301, annefrankexhibit.org.