NYC replica of famed Anne Frank House amplifies humanity of those murdered by Nazis
Reproduction of tiny Amsterdam annex where young diarist hid with her family opens to the public at the Center for Jewish History on Monday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day
- Young adults visit 'Anne Frank: The Exhibition,' at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, January 2025. (John Halpern)
- 'Anne Frank: The Exhibition,' at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, January 2025. (John Halpern)
- 'Anne Frank: The Exhibition,' at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, January 2025. (John Halpern)
- 'Anne Frank: The Exhibition,' at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, January 2025. (John Halpern)
NEW YORK — It almost felt a little intrusive. Just how much about this girl’s life am I supposed to know?
I was in a reproduction of the secret annex to the canal house where Anne Frank hid for 761 days during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. I’d already snuck around a wooden bookshelf just like the one that separated Otto Frank’s offices from the makeshift sanctuary within.
Then I walked through three rooms: the one shared by Anne’s parents, Otto and Edith, and her older sister Margot; a smaller one shared by Anne and Fritz Pfeffer, Anne’s not-particularly-beloved dentist roommate 40 years her senior; the shared living and dining space that doubled as a bedroom for Hermann and Auguste van Pels; and finally the smallest room of all, the back corner room belonging to Peter van Pels that included a ladder up to the attic where Anne and Peter shared their first kiss.
It was here, scribbling away in my notebook next to another visiting journalist while listening to piped-in audio from one of the juicer passages from “Diary of a Young Girl,” that the Anne Frank phenomenon hit me harder than ever: these were real people.
That revelation — stemming from the mundane (though brilliantly written) nature of Anne Frank’s diary — is, of course, what has sustained her story for generations. For millions of people, Anne’s naturalistic, seemingly effortless writing is the first and perhaps most lasting human connection to the Holocaust, more so than any history lesson or brutal documentary film.
Maybe that is why Michael Glickman, CEO of the company jMUSE, one of the organizations that worked to bring “Anne Frank: The Exhibition” to the Center for Jewish History in New York City, called it “the most important Jewish exhibition presented in this country” during remarks to the press a few days before its public opening.
While the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam was converted into a museum 65 years ago, not everyone can make the trip. And, as Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House explained to us, those that do get to the Dutch city often find themselves unable to secure tickets. (Windmills, Van Gogh and enormous wheels of Gouda in red wax make a nice consolation prize, though.)
The new show in New York opens on January 27 (International Holocaust Remembrance Day) and is scheduled to close on April 30. Advanced tickets are selling well, so I anticipate an extension, but don’t count on that until it’s official; if you can book a time to go now, you should. The exhibit boasts over 100 artifacts that, per Ronald Leopold, rarely if ever are on view in Amsterdam.
“In a way, here in New York you get ‘more’ than you get in Amsterdam,” he added.

The presentation, Leopold feels, succeeds in continuing Otto Frank’s mission dating back to 1960, that visitors not just learn about the past, but learn from the past.
In addition to the core of the exhibit — recreating the rooms from the annex — there are items that belonged to the Frank family juxtaposed with images and videos placing their lives in Frankfurt and Amsterdam, as well as Otto Frank’s life after Auschwitz. The cumulative effect continues the work of “Diary of a Young Girl” — making the enormity of the Holocaust tangible through specificity.

The Center for Jewish History is uniquely positioned to house this exhibit, being a collection of connected row houses in a residential Manhattan neighborhood. (Some of their more playful events in recent years include “Jews in Space: Members of the Tribe in Orbit” and “Am Yisrael High: The Story of Jews and Cannabis.”) As such, when one takes the tour, some unusual turns and ramps add to the psychological effect of hiding further from view and away from the street.
The first room, where one is likely to bump into a symbolically placed trunk owned by Otto Frank, shows family photos and tchotchkes. There’s a soup ladle Edith Frank used to feed her family in Frankfurt. Here’s a tiny record player purchased for Anne and Margot in 1929. On a shelf is a copy of Spinoza’s “Ethics” owned by the family, next to a book of the Torah in German and Hebrew. On the wall is a blown-up photo of Otto with his brother Robert in their World War I uniforms beside an image of German-Jewish soldiers observing Yom Kippur in Brussels.

Then they moved to Amsterdam, where the family thought they’d be safe. One can see the typewriter that belonged to Miep Gies, the Frank family confidante who hid Anne’s diary after she was captured and sent east. Also, some advertising for Otto’s pectin and spice company. A photo shows Anne smiling at a desk with rows of her classmates. In another room, a medal Margot won with her rowing team, next to report cards and a Dutch version of the board game Monopoly.

Lurking above, around, and beyond this are sinister images of encroaching Nazism. “We do not consider the Jews to be members of the Dutch nation. To us, the Jews are not Dutch. The Jews are the enemy with whom no armistice or peace can be made,” intones Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reichskommisar for the German-occupied Netherlands.
This leads, then, to the annex and the tiny rooms where the Franks, the van Pelses and Fritz Pfeffer tried nobly to wait out the insanity of the outside world. The reproduction of Anne and Fritz’s room has famous cutouts of movie stars affixed to the wall, as well as some classical works of art. (Leonardo Da Vinci’s self-portrait makes an appearance.)
We see the desk where she wrote her diary, and a recording explains how she and Pfeffer bickered over its use. (He was teaching himself Spanish while she was creating one of the most important firsthand records of the 20th century.) I almost missed it, but on the corner next to some candies is a facsimile of the red checkered diary that Anne received as a gift on her 13th birthday.
After Peter van Pels’s room, where I finally had my out-of-body experience (not uncommon when I visit Holocaust exhibits), there is a sharp turn and a striking, well-lit chamber with a glass floor over a topographic map of Europe. There we see colored flags representing Nazi concentration camps. A maze of sorts walks us through the efficiency of the “final solution,” bringing us, finally, back to that photo of Anne Frank and her classmates. A voice reads out their names, then the age and location of where they each perished.

The final section of the exhibit details how Otto Frank brought Anne’s diary to the world. You can scoff at the rejection letter he received from Viking Press for an American publication, then see 79 different translations from around the world — 30 million copies have been sold. (Also on display, is a blouse worn by Susan Strasberg in the 1955 stage adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” and Shelley Winters’s Oscar for portraying Petronella Van Daan in the 1959 movie.)
The final note is a letter from Otto Frank to a group of schoolchildren in the Bronx, who were compelled to write to him after reading Anne’s work in 1973. He told them not to judge her too much for seeming, on occasion, mean to her mother, and also warned them against the virus of prejudice.

My visit to “Anne Frank: The Exhibit” came less than 24 hours after a Jewish childcare center in Sydney was torched, protesters hiding behind masks disrupted an Israeli professor’s class at Columbia University and President Trump’s best pal Elon Musk, weeks after deploying a Pepe meme, made what sure as heck looked like a Nazi salute to me at the inauguration.
Over 350 school visits are already booked for “Anne Frank: The Exhibit,” from all across North America. These visits, as well as a student curriculum designed to work in concert with the exhibit, are free of charge thanks to a group of benefactors. (Barbra Streisand was among the names listed.) I’m told that aides and educators will tamp down some of the more brutal elements for the elementary school-aged visitors, but will not deny the reality of what the exhibit represents.
When Ronald Leopold made his opening remarks, it included a poignant moment in which he held up a paper with two photos. On the left, is a well-known image of young Anne Frank. On the right, a boy I’d never seen before. His name was Levy Spanjer. He was born June 12, 1929, the same day as Anne, and the two lived near one another. It’s highly likely they walked the same streets, and may have even been acquainted. Thanks to Miep Gies and Otto Frank, we know everything about Anne. We know nothing about Levy, other than he died at Auschwitz at the age of 13. This is his exhibit, too.
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