Forever an icon of hope

The timeless musings of a 14-year-old Jewish girl recorded in a diary still bear deep resonance almost a century hence. This time, her story is told and recreated in one space here in New York City.

The Anne Frank House of Amsterdam, in partnership with the Center for Jewish History, staged The Anne Frank Exhibition, an ongoing groundbreaking exposition that brings Anne’s story back to life. From her younger years in Germany up to her last days in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she and her sister Margot died, the exhaustively curated exhibition masterfully reconstructs the hiding place of Anne and seven other Jewish exiles and the events interwoven within the context of wars and the horrors of the holocaust.

Along with my parents who are visiting New York, I attended the exhibit with the curious question of how Anne Frank’s life would be presented. Is it going to be a museum-like tour? Since tickets are always sold out, will we be able to engage deeply into her story, considering the crowd?

After we were briefed on how to use the green phone-like gadget that served as our audio guide, our immersive journey through the life of a young girl whose diary has been translated to 70 languages seamlessly began. I was glad that photo and video taking were not allowed, except before and after the exhibit because then, we were able to better appreciate her saga and reflect more deeply into the episodes of Anne’s life, especially when juxtaposed with the context of events in our modern world.

Part I tells the marriage of Anne’s parents, Otto Frank and Edith Hollander-Frank, both from Jewish-German families. Along the walls and inside glass-encased shelves are photographs and memorabilia of the young Otto as an intern at Macy’s Department Store in New York, the trunk he used for the trip, the couple’s wedding day with friends, pieces of crockery and silverware and the children’s gramophone that the Franks gave to their neighbors as gift to celebrate Anne’s birth. This part of the display is a collection that reminisces the blissful, affluent and serene life of the Franks.

As we moved to the next side of the hall, I sensed the shift in mood of the crowd – from curious to pensive, displeased, bewildered yet attentive but with most of us certainly trying to make sense of that time and place in history. The day Anne was born – June 12, 1929, the Philippines then must be celebrating its independence as a young 31-year-old republic. Around that time Germany had just lost the war. Haunting as it may sound, Jewish minorities were held responsible for the country’s social and economic woes. This area of the exhibition up to the succeeding rooms poignantly relates the epic of the Jewish people throughout history.

Beneath the fiberglass flooring of one of the rooms was a map of Europe presenting vivid illustrations of places where transition, concentration and death camps and gas chambers were located. The intense narrations, film clips, photographs and written accounts are too painful to listen to, watch or read about. But we nevertheless engaged ourselves as if sharing in the same spirit echoed in the very words of Anne: “I can’t build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death.” Like her, we tried to be undaunted and optimistic that “peace and tranquility will return again.”

The high point of the exhibition is the “Annex.” Recreated as it was like in Amsterdam in one of the wings on the second floor of the Center for Jewish History, the Annex was the hiding place situated behind a bookcase with five rooms where eight people – the Franks (a family of four), the van Pels (a family of three) and Fritz Pfeffer, the eighth resident – inconspicuously lived for two years. As I thoughtfully explored the room while listening to the audio account, it was hard to imagine the conditions of once wealthy families living in a cramped space. Their movements were hushed and planned; they could only use the bathroom at a very specific time in the morning or converse with each other at particular moments of the day.

But a description of their typical day, through Anne’s diary entries on how they tried to establish a semblance of normalcy under discreet circumstances, speak much of the power of human resilience and how gratitude gladdened her heart. “It may be damp and lopsided, but there’s probably not a more comfortable hiding place in all of Amsterdam,” Anne wrote. It is said that the muted walls of the Annex bore witness to heartening chats over tea and board games among the hiders. Birthdays and special occasions were celebrated and like every typical teenager of her time, Anne fell in love with their housemates’ son, Peter. The romance was short-lived and faded away because Anne soon discovered her love of and gift for writing. “I can shake off everything as I write, my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn,” she wrote.

Amidst the darkness surrounding her, Anne continued to write short stories, mused over the mundane, “we scrub, sweep and do the washing” and penned some of the most inspiring and courageous thoughts a 14-year-old could write about, they have echoed and still reverberate all across races and generations.

Her father Otto, on one hand, motivated by the meaning of Anne’s diary, has committed the rest of his life to the legacy she passed on. Toward the twilight of his life, Otto vowed “to fight for reconciliation and for human rights across the world.”

With war raging in the Middle East and so much violence across countries now, it gives us so much hope to remember Anne’s view to “not think of the misery but of the beauty that still remain” and that in the long run, “the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.”