Extraordinary Design and Execution Transports Anne Frank and Her Times to New York

By Eric Uhlfelder

Anne’s bedroom (shared with Fritz Pfeiffer) and her desk and diary. Photo credit: John Halpern.

The transposition is shocking.

From a quiet Chelsea street into the emerging storm that grew into World War II and the Holocaust . . . even when carrying knowledge of what is to come, one can’t fully prepare to intimately confront the life and times of Anne Frank at the Center for Jewish History on West 16th Street.

Credit Ronald Leopold and Tom Brink, executive director and head of collections of the Anne Frank House, for bringing this exhibit to New York.

Anne Frank at her desk. 1941-04. From the collection of Anne Frank House.

Working closely with Tom to achieve this remarkable effect was Dutch designer Eric Goosens who gave shape to the exhibit on so many dimensions. It starts with an unexpected and clever layout and presentation, lighting and color palette that evolves with pitch-perfect pacing. All of this helps tell the story as much as the wide-ranging content of the exhibition, including the first full-scale replica of the annex in which Anne and her family and colleagues lived for two years.

That content of all different mediums, appearing in all shapes and sizes, includes contemporaneous images and film, furniture, official Nazi orders, personal scraps, images, and artifacts, handwritten poems and notes . . . and a diary. All of this is then seamlessly tied together by succinct audio commentary.

The exhibition leads us through two parallel storylines: the emerging Holocaust and the experiences and spaces occupied by an insightful teenage girl who couldn’t have known the full extent of atrocities that were to envelop her family, her religion, and most of Europe, and how far her words would eventually reach.

Echoing the times it documents, the maze-like exhibition is meant to disorient. Laid out chronologically, it twists and turns from lightness into darkness, chocked full of fascinating and increasingly disturbing details.

It starts benignly revealing the Franks’ upper middle-class life in Frankfurt. Fearing what Germany was devolving into, Anne’s father Otto moved the family to Amsterdam where we follow their lives from 1933 to 1940.

It’s at that point where viewers get their last glimpse of natural light through a partially glass-enclosed passage that funnels one into a black box theater, shifting the narrative that had been driven by objects and stills to large multi-walled videos of contemporaneous footage revealing the increasingly oppressive life Jews faced in Amsterdam after Germany invaded in 1940.

Under Nazi rule, Dutch officials set up social and educational restrictions, segregated facilities, meted out punishment and death, required residents to register with the authorities with the location of all Jewish residents mapped out to help with the forced deportations that were soon to come.

The family living space. Photo credit: John Halpern.

That’s when Anne’s father, Otto Frank, decided to turn the annex in the building that housed his small business on Prinsengracht 263 into a secret living space on the top floors. When Anne’s older sister, Margot, received a deportation notice in 1942, the family went into hiding.

From the theater, the exhibition leads us though a hinged bookcase that swings open into the spaces where the Franks would hide for the next two years, never to venture outside.

Drawing precisely from the Anne Frank House, Amsterdam-based designers Annemiek Swinkels and Willem Claassen carefully reproduced the secret annex. We see small bedrooms adorned with favorite images and artificially backlit windows that realistically convey how curtains and shades were always drawn to prevent discovery. Also recreated are several living spaces the Franks shared alongside Otto’s business partner Herman and his wife Auguste and their son Peter; and a local dentist Fritz Pfeiffer.

We also see the small desk where Anne wrote.

The glass floor over a massive map of Nazi Europe and the Holocaust. Photo credit: John Halpern.

Conveying the sudden shock of arrest in August 1944 and deportation that soon followed, the exhibition throws us immediately into the path of the Holocaust. We enter a glass-floor room under which a map of Europe plots the death camps. Above, the exhibition’s path is shaped by various hanging images of sights that are to come, taking us from initial killing fields of open ravines, pits and ghettos, eventually into the concentration camps.

Toward the end of this passage, there’s a picture of Anne and her classmates at the Montessori school she attended in Amsterdam that individually depicts the fate of each child.

This most brutal part of the exhibit then gives way to a wider more well-lit space accented with color, conveying relief from what had been. It’s here we learn Otto Frank survived Auschwitz.

His return home took three months, crossing Poland to Odessa, a boat to Marseilles, then a train ride home through France and to Amsterdam. We learn of kindness shown to many survivors along the way.

Once back in the Netherlands, returning Jews were cooly received, as if an unpleasant reminder of what had been. And we learn one of the most shocking statistics: of the 107,000 Jews that had lived in the country before the war, only 5,000 survived. Among the tens of thousands who didn’t were Otto’s wife Edith and their children.

Throughout, the exhibition brought this viewer many revelations.

Occupants of the annex: Franks, van Pels, and Pfeiffer. Photo credit: John Halpern.

Otto Frank applied for US immigration visas in 1938 at the American consulate in Rotterdam. But his application documents were never processed, destroyed when Germany bombed the city in May 1940.

Anne and Margot nearly survived Bergen-Belsen, dying of typhus just weeks before the camp was liberated in April 1945. 

Anne’s diary could easily have been lost—first by the authorities when they ransacked the annex after the family’s arrest and then by Miep Gies, one of many who worked for Otto and fed the families at great personal risk. She admits never having read the diary before giving it to Otto upon his return from Auschwitz. But if she had, Gies said she would have destroyed it because it counted all those complicit in hiding Jews.

We learn Otto only truly began to understand his daughter after having read her diary.

We learn the diary was originally rejected by a Dutch publisher and by the venerable New York publisher Viking Press. But it would eventually become translated into more than 70 languages (most on display) with a print run of 30 million. And Anne’s story was adapted for the theater, becoming a Pulitzer and Tony Award winning Broadway play and a feature film.

The exhibition concludes with Otto’s final thoughts about the book. Today, with nations again resorting to war more frequently as our politics and diplomacy fail, Frank’s words are even more relevant for world leaders to hear than they were 65 years ago when he wrote them.

The exhibition runs through October 31st at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, www.cjh.org