June 22



USA:

Holocaust exhibit focuses on Anne Frank


Anne Frank died in a German concentration camp more than half a century
ago, yet her words have survived the war that ended her life.

Her legacy lives on in a red plaid diary that her father gave her as a
13th birthday present. Her battered notebooks became a glimpse into the
literary talent that blossomed during the two years of World War II she
spent in a secret annex to an office building in Amsterdam when she was
one of the hidden children of the Holocaust.

Anne Frank's brief life is recounted once again in a special exhibit that
opened June 12 at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Over the past
decade, 19 million people have visited the museum to see evidence of the
horror of an era when 8 million Jews died in concentration camps, gas
chambers and crematoria at the hands of Adolf Hitler's Nazis.

Yet there is nothing dramatic about the little gallery of dimly lighted,
winding corridors where fragments of a family's life are encased in glass.
There is a facsimile of the plaid diary, in its own glass box. There are
pages covered with neatly rounded handwriting. There are photograph albums
of people who are smiling. Gazing out from a yellowed photograph at the
entrance to the gallery is the face of a bright-eyed child sitting at a
table, holding a pencil. Two years later, the same face is that of a
dark-eyed young woman, her somber expression reflecting the two years
during which she waited for death.

In the last corridor of the exhibit, a portion of wall is covered by a
black-and-white mural symbolizing what the Franks feared most - Auschwitz,
the camp to which they were shipped after their discovery and arrest in
1945, and where Edith Frank, Anne's mother, died after her daughters were
sent to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp.

Anne Frank was one of the victims of the slaughter of Europe's Jews during
the war years. Yet her death was transcended by the revelations of her
daily life, which she chronicled in several notebooks, beginning with the
flight of the Frank family into hiding in 1942. After she perished from
typhus with her sister, Margot, in Bergen Belsen in 1945, a few months
before the end of the war, Anne's diaries were returned to her father,
Otto Frank, who survived Auschwitz.

He edited them for publishing in the early 1950s. By the time he died in
1980, he had seen his dead daughter achieve global recognition for the
sensitivity of the observations that she wrote to "Kitty," as she named
the diary, which became her best friend in her isolated world.

A few months after hiding, Anne wrote, "Not being able to go outside
upsets me more than I can say and I'm terrified that our hiding place will
be discovered and that we'll be shot. That, of course, is a fairly dismal
prospect."

She added, "I can shake off everything if I can write."

She put essays and fairy tales in the diary, where she could give free
rein to her imagination, pasting in pages when she ran out of paper. In an
essay called "Give!" written in 1944, she urged that more kindness should
be shown to the unfortunate.

"People are just people," she wrote, "and all people have faults and
shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness."

She spoke Dutch, German and some English and read avidly. She wrote of
becoming an author or a journalist: "How interesting it would be if I were
to publish a romance of 'The Secret Annex.'"

Yet the nightmare outside was never far from her thoughts. In 1942, she
wrote, "Cycling, dancing, whistling, looking at the world, feeling young,
to know I am free - that is what I long for and mustn't show it."

Perhaps her darkest thoughts were expressed in February 1944, when she
wrote sadly, "The world will still keep on turning without me; what is
going to happen, will happen, and anyway, it's no good trying to resist."

A few months later, when hopes rose because of the Allied landings in
Normandy, she wrote, "I hear the ever approaching thunder which will
destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet if I look up
into the heavens, I think it will all come right, that this cruelty too
will end, and peace and tranquility will return."

A local informer accepted a German bounty and betrayed the hiding place of
the Franks.

Buddy Elias, president of the Anne Frank Fund in the Netherlands, and a
first cousin of the diarist, noted that Otto Frank excised from the
original publication of "Diary of a Young Girl" portions he thought
unsuitable for publication, such as her tirades about her mother and her
description of her own body as she grew into adolescence. As Anne Frank's
fame grew, those sections were replaced in later editions of her book.

Standing outside the latest memorial to the young diarist, Elias shook his
head and sighed.

"She was so curious, even as a child," he said, "and as she lived under
those strange circumstances, she became an observer and an analyst of
human nature."

(source: Associated Press)