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There's a recreation of Anne Frank's house in NYC, and students can visit for free
By
Jessica Gould
Published Jan 26, 2025
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Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
By
Jessica Gould
Published Jan 26, 2025
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My daughter was 7 when she came home from school and asked if I had ever heard of someone named “Annie” Frank. Her second-grade classroom had a National Geographic book about the famous diarist, and she thought “Annie” – her reading was just coming along – had “nice eyes.”
So, for the first time, I told my daughter about the Holocaust, and revealed to her that she is a fourth-generation survivor.
For my daughter and countless students before her, Anne Frank's story was a way into a complex, horrifying and essential piece of history. Starting Monday, students in New York City and from across the country will have a new entry point to that history, when a recreation of Anne Frank’s house opens at the Center for Jewish History near Union Square.
“Anne Frank: The Exhibition” features a replica of the hidden annex where eight Jewish people, including Anne and her family, lived for two years between July 1942 and August 1944 before they were discovered and sent to death camps.
“We give the visitor an opportunity to really experience what life was like for them,” said Michael Glickman, the CEO of jMUSE, a philanthropic organization focused on Jewish museums that is sponsoring the exhibit.
Visitors will be able to enter the cramped space and see where Anne wrote her diary, including her famous quote: “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”
The exhibit is in partnership with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, where the family actually lived, and opens on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s designed for ages 10 and up, and free to all New York City public school students, as well all students nationally who attend high-poverty (Title 1) schools. Glickman said 300 schools have scheduled visits already, and organizers expect 250,000 students to come. The exhibition also comes with a special curriculum to help teachers guide discussions.
A room in the original Anne Frank house.
Courtesy of the Anne Frank House
In the New York City incarnation, the annex is furnished, unlike the real annex in Amsterdam, which remains bare. Glickman said the exhibit is a “meticulous” recreation featuring 100 artifacts from the occupants’ lives, including some going on display for the first time. Visitors can view Anne Frank’s poetry book and a board game she played.
Outside the recreated rooms, there are films and photographs tracing Anne Frank’s life, starting in Frankfurt, Germany, and ending with her eventual death in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp when she was 15. Visitors will follow the journey her father, Otto Frank, from his liberation from Auschwitz to his return to Amsterdam, where he learned the fates of his family members, found Anne’s diary and started pitching it to publishers. The exhibit includes a rejection from one publishing house in 1947. The book has sold 30 million copies.
Doyle Stevick, a professor and executive director of the Anne Frank Center at the University of South Carolina, helped craft the curriculum that accompanies the exhibit. He said young students have always been drawn to Anne Frank and her diary.
“When I was in school, the ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ was the only thing we encountered that was written by someone our own age. Everything else came from adults talking to — or talking down to – young people,” he said. “It’s not that we shared experiences with Anne Frank of course, but we could relate to her emotions, her frustration with the troubled world that the actions of supposedly mature adults produced.”
Stevick said Anne Frank’s individual spark– from her youthful idealism to her adolescent angst – has provided a portal to the history of the Holocaust, and an equally vital instrument against the dehumanization of hate.
“Encountering her full humanity frames for us the depth of the human loss that was the Holocaust,” he said. “We want to know not just the machinery of death, but rather than people and cultures and communities – which were simultaneously Jewish specifically and universally human –that were stolen from us.”
The Anne Frank “secret annex” recreation opens at the Center for Jewish History on West 16th Street near Union Square on Jan. 27 and runs through April 30.
Tagged
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manhattan
Jessica Gould
Jessica is the education reporter for WNYC and Gothamist. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Jessica reported on the shutdown and reopening of the nation’s largest school system, highlighting the unprecedented impacts on learning, health and mental health for students, staff and families. Got a tip? Email [email protected]
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