NEW YORK — As you leave Anne Frank’s hiding place near the end of this immersive tour, you step into a room with a raised glass floor illuminated beneath your feet. It shows the map of Europe in World War II. Little flags mark sites of concentration camps and other places where Jews were massacred.
The effect is startling. You get a sterile overview of the Holocaust while standing on a surface that feels fragile and disorienting. For a moment, you are not quite sure of your footing. And this display is only the second-most jarring element in this particular room.
Even more disconcerting is a large video screen on one wall that shows a black-and-white photograph of Anne Frank’s Montessori kindergarten class in Amsterdam in 1935, with Anne in the middle, in the back of a room filled with about three dozen kids.
As a recorded voice reads their names, the images of 10 children dissolve — one by one — into dark silhouettes, Jewish victims of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. They were among six million Jews murdered.
This is one of five rooms of Anne Frank the Exhibition at the Center for Jewish History in Union Square in Manhattan. It is a reproduction of the secret annex used by Frank’s family (and four other persons) to hide from the Nazis in the Netherlands from the summer of 1942 through summer, 1944.
After their discovery and arrest, Anne died at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her father, Otto Frank, survived, acquired her diary, and published it. Later, movies were based on the book as well as a play called The Diary of Anne Frank.
Around that drama, her story remains current. When a production was staged late last year northwest of Detroit in Howell Township in Livingston County, protestors outside the building carried swastikas. Two similar demonstrations took place in the same county last summer.
It’s not only in Michigan. In Ohio, for instance, on Feb. 7, about a dozen people dressed in black and wearing red face-coverings waved swastika flags over an I-75 overpass in Cincinnati near an historic African American area. When residents confronted them, police protected the protestors but urged them to leave.
After they departed, one of the local residents burned a swastika banner. Others gathered for a prayer circle. A similar rally took place in Columbus, the state capital, in November. According to a BBC report, antisemitic incidents increased by 200% in the U.S. last year.
Some came during demonstrations against Israel for its military response to Hamas in Gaza after Palestinian terrorists murdered at least 1,200 persons during an attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The Anti-Defamation League Center for Extremism told BBC there were 10,000 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. in the following 11 months.
But not all protests against Israel's war response are necessarily antisemitic. The Gaza health ministry reports that nearly 50,000 Gazans have died in Israeli attacks. Advocates for their side say the Gazans lived even before the war in an open-air prison akin to apartheid.
There might even be a young Palestinian girl hiding in a shelter with her family, keeping a diary of what happens when tribalism trades up from hate to bombs. Once a war starts, there is plenty of grief to go around and it can get petty and stupid.
For instance: Last month in Florida, The Guardian reported, “a Jewish man in Miami Beach is facing charges of attempted murder following accusations that he opened fire on two men he believed were Palestinians but reportedly turned out to be Israeli visitors.” Both survived.
This is why the Holocaust must be taught again and again, and why an exhibit about Anne Frank is still necessary. Because, 80 years after the end of World War II, some people either deny the Holocaust, or they approve of it or they know virtually nothing about it.
My personal awareness was jolted 50 years ago when I lived in the mid-1970s in the north Chicago suburb of Evanston. To work downtown (or to go to Cubs’ games at Wrigley Field) I’d take a bus on Howard Street to the train station and catch the elevated train, called the “El.”
The eastbound bus was called the “97 Skokie” because it began in the suburb of Skokie, right next to Evanston’s western border. Having moved there that spring, I noticed something different when the weather warmed and men wore short-sleeved shirts.
Their forearms bore blue tattoos with numbers, not the artistic “ink” seen on skin today. It was instead the permanent identification the Nazis forced on them in the camps in Europe. Skokie, I soon learned, included many Holocaust survivors. This was just 30 years after the war. Some of these people were of Anne Frank’s generation.
In the summer of 1977, on a trip to Europe, I visited the real Anne Frank house in the Netherlands. Unlike the replica on display in New York, it has no homey touches like beds and desks, only bare walls. When I returned enlightened to Chicago, I learned the local Nazis planned to march in Skokie.
That led to months of bitter debate and court battles with the American Civil Liberties Union supporting the Nazis on First Amendment grounds of free speech. Eventually, the marchers won their case but staged only a brief and minor demonstration at a federal building in Chicago, not Skokie.
If this episode sounds dated, consider something from President Donald Trump’s first term, when Trump discovered “very fine people on both sides” after a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where mostly young, white, male marchers carried torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us!”
A counter-protestor died when she was intentionally run over by a car. The Frank exhibit and this sort of demonstration remind us of where this stuff can lead. Its stay in New York has been extended through October, but also has been designed to travel.
No future destinations have been announced. Along with replicas of the annex rooms, other parts show the context of the family’s life and the political changes that consumed them. There is a board game. There’s the Torah of Anne’s mother, Edith, in German and Hebrew.
The family had moved from Frankfurt, Germany, to Holland to get away from the Nazis. A picture shows Otto Frank in a German uniform in World War I; another photo shows German-Jewish soldiers observing Yom Kippur. On a wall there hangs a bicycle.
More sinister artifacts of the era include photos of Nazi rallies, the damage to synagogues after Kristallnacht, book burnings, and Jews rounded up wearing yellow stars. In a glass case rests a large dagger from the Sturmabteilung, the paramilitary organization also known as the Brownshirts that played a significant role in Hitler’s rise to power. Inscribed in the gleaming metal is the motto “Alles fur Deutschland”: “Everything for Germany.”
By mixing family items with photos of the terror building outside, the exhibit shows how a sophisticated and civilized culture quickly became barbaric. Had Anne survived, she might still be alive. How many books might she have written? Her 96th birthday is June 12; her written words live on.
