Arts

A re-creation of the secret annex the Frank family lived in before being sent to concentration camps has drawn accusations of exploiting the story.

First you see scarves and bags hanging inside the door, before entering a sparsely furnished room with two single beds. Next is another, smaller room with two more single beds. On the wall of the second bedroom are pictures of film stars and colourful postcards. There is also a desk with a closed, red-checked diary on it. Next, there is a lavatory, a parlour room doubling as another bedroom, and a final bedroom with a bicycle hanging on the wall, with a ladder rising to an attic space.

“The central installation in Anne Frank: The Exhibition, which opens on Monday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, at the Center for Jewish History in New York, is a meticulous recreation of the secret annex where Anne Frank and her family lived in Amsterdam between 1942 and 1944, before they and those who lived with them were sent to concentration camps.

In this confined space with blacked-out windows lived Anne, her sister Margot, their parents, Otto and Edith, as well as Otto’s business partner Hermann van Pels, his wife, Auguste, and their son Peter. The final member of the household, Fritz Pfeffer, was part of the Franks’ social circle. He shared a bedroom with Anne.”

“Anne died, aged 15, in Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, shortly before the camp was liberated. Only Otto Frank survived his incarceration at Auschwitz, and it was he who ensured his daughter’s writing became known to the world.

The exhibition opens with Otto’s open luggage trunk, and there are various Frank family documents, crockery, luggage and personal possessions in display cases. “We don’t have space to display all the artefacts in Amsterdam, so this is a good opportunity to do so,” Tom Brink, head of collections and presentations at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and curator of the “world premiere” of the exhibition in New York, told The Times. The diary on the desk is a facsimile; the original remains in Amsterdam.”

“Brink rejects accusations that the re-creation amounts to exploitative “trauma porn”, saying the exhibition is one component of a larger one focusing on the history of the Frank family. We follow their history before, during and — in sketching Otto’s life — after the war, and how the history of the Frank family intersected with the violently repressive rise of Nazism.”

“The exhibition graphically illustrates how Jews in the Netherlands like the Franks were forced into hiding having had their rights and freedoms stripped from them, and their ability to escape vanquished.

“I understand many people focus on the exact replica of the hiding place,” Brink conceded. “But I would never recreate the annex and make it stand alone in a museum or outside in a marketplace. I did this part of a long family story that starts in the early 20th century and ends in the 1970s. The replica of the annex is only one chapter in a larger story.”

Brink said it felt “very special” to spend time in the original annex, even if it had a “heavy feeling” to it. To read Anne’s original diaries reminds him what a good writer, yet also ordinary young woman, she was.”

“He said: “She was incredibly observant about everyone’s lives in the annex. She started rewriting it two months before she was arrested. I think she would have liked to have the diary published, even if she didn’t know that would happen.

She was 13 years old when she began to write it and so talented — and then had to suSer this terrible thing just because she was Jewish. I have children, and it is just incomprehensible, awful, to think something like this could happen to them.””

For Brink, there are two unsolved mysteries about life in the annex; first, a precise understanding of the decline in atmosphere from happy cohabitation to inevitable close-quarter fights and quarrels as time dragged on. Second, despite much conjecture, it has not been conclusively revealed who, if anyone, informed the Nazis of the annex’s inhabitants — or if it was rank misfortune that they were found. “We still don’t know, and to be honest I don’t think we’ll ever know,” Brink said.

The Times of London