Anne Frank’s life unveiled in New York City exhibit
We know the diary, we’ve seen her black-and-white photos, the smile as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s.
And of course, we know the story — of her family’s desperate attempts to flee the Nazis, and the two years they spent hiding in a secret annex before being betrayed, arrested and sent to the concentration camps, where only the girl’s father Otto would survive.
And yet, for all that, Anne Frank remains something of an abstraction, especially for the many who have never trekked to Amsterdam and the Anne Frank House museum, which houses hundreds of artifacts and personal items of the Frank family. It also contains the infamous secret annex hidden behind a bookcase, which has been carefully preserved.
A reconstruction of Anne Frank’s room and her desk where she wrote her historic diary. Credit: John Halpern
But now, in a landmark collaboration between the Anne Frank House and Manhattan’s Center for Jewish History, the Frank family and their milieu are being brought to vivid life in this country as never before. “Anne Frank The Exhibition,” which opens Monday at Manhattan’s Center for Jewish History, is the largest of its kind ever mounted outside Amsterdam, 7,500 square feet of installations and artifacts — some never before seen by the public — along with a full-scale model of the rooms where the Frank family and other Jews lived from 1942 until their arrest in 1944.
“In a way, you get more than what you see in Amsterdam,” said Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House, at a Tuesday media preview of the exhibition, for which tens of thousands of tickets have already been sold. Whereas the real secret annex has long been left empty in accordance with Otto Frank’s wishes (the emptiness “symbolizes the void left behind by the millions of people who were deported and never returned,” according to the Anne Frank House Facebook page), the exhibition’s recreation is meant to look as it might have when the Franks inhabited it.
A poetry album with a poem written by Anne Frank on display. Credit: Ray van der Bas
Cots lie just inches from one another, windows are covered so that the rooms’ inhabitants could avoid detection, walls are lined with photos of Hollywood actors and royals that Anne herself admired, desks and tables are outfitted with period writing pens, board games and a desk similar to the one used by Anne to write her diary. Together with the rest of the exhibition, the annex exhibit offers what Leopold summed up as an “intimate glimpse into Anne’s life, her world and her legacy.”
The exhibition’s several rooms and interactive exhibits tell a chronological story, starting with the Franks’ pre-Amsterdam lives in Frankfurt and continuing past the family’s tragic end to the Allies’ liberation of the concentration camps and the subsequent impact of the publication of Anne’s diary. Large-scale installations such as a room-size glass floor map of Europe depicting the locations of major sites of mass killings, concentration camps and Jewish ghettos during the war are complemented by small touches and ephemera — a reproduction of Anne’s simple red-plaid diary, her first photo album and some original poetry written in Anne’s own hand; a 1933 ballot from Germany’s national elections in which Adolf Hitler’s is the only party on the ballot.
The first U.S. editon of Anne Frank “The Diary of a Young Girl” 1952. Credit: Harold Strak
Artifacts include a Dutch language version of Monopoly that Anne and a fellow student once played; products from the Opekta company, the manufacturer of thickeners for jams and jellies where Otto Frank worked in Amsterdam after the family fled Germany; a windup gramophone that Otto and his wife Edith gave to the children who lived next door as a way of celebrating Anne’s birth in 1929.
The exhibition concludes with a moving look at how Anne’s diary has traveled the world since its publication. There is the somewhat surprising 1947 letter in which Viking Press decided against putting out the book, and the acceptance letter from Doubleday, which published the first English-language edition in 1952. Contemporaneous reviews of the diary are on view, as are posters and other memorabilia from the various stage plays and films the diary gave rise to, including the Oscar statuette actress Shelley Winters won for a part in the 1959 movie version.
The exhibit features family photos and a full-scale recreation of Anne Frank’s Annex. Credit: John Halpern
And then, as a final flourish, the exhibition concludes with dozens of copies of various editions of the diary published in the years since. Glass cases containing the books seem to go on forever, and yet represent only a small sample of the many published versions of the book, which at last count had been printed in more than 70 languages.
“Anne Frank’s story is known to many but what you will experience here in this exhibition goes beyond that,” said Leopold. “It goes beyond her tragic fate, hopefully offering a deeper and maybe multifaceted view of who Anne Frank was.”
“Anne Frank The Exhibition” runs through April 30 at the Center for Jewish History, 15 W. 16th St., in Manhattan. Timed tickets are $21 Monday through Friday ($16 ages 17 and under), $27 Sunday and holidays ($22 ages 17 and under). Closed Saturday. Family and flex prices are also available. For tickets and further information, visit annefrankexhibit.org.
Newsday writer and restaurant critic Scott Vogel aims for a refreshing, gimlet-eyed take on the Long Island food scene, often while drinking a refreshing gimlet.
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