By Brooke Kohl
Anne Frank The Exhibition at the Center for Jewish History has already extended its limited run through October, and tickets are currently sold out until May. Although its main selling point is “A Full-Scale Recreation of Anne Frank’s hiding place,” their recreation seemed more like a five minute blip in the middle of an exhibit about the Holocaust.
On Tuesday, March 11, the Stern College for Women (SCW) Honors program visited the exhibition. Misnomer aside, the most unsettling aspect of the experience as a whole was the lack of emotion it evoked. As an exhibit teaching viewers about people who lived in fear of discovery and death for two years, it should have given more of a sense of the fear that they felt.
The exhibit began with a long section about pre-war Germany and the rise of the Nazi party, giving necessary background about the Frank family as well as life in Germany leading up to the Holocaust. Context established, the exhibit continued into a dark pathway with walls full of swastikas and on to a huge room in which three walls were covered with video screens. A video played, showing crowds of hundreds saluting Hitler and relaying information specifically about the Holocaust in the Netherlands, where the Frank family lived after moving from Germany.
This was the most impactful part of the exhibit. I shuddered at huge pictures of Jews being sent to concentration camps, and at a quote from Arthur Seyss-Inwuart, an Austrian Nazi official: “We do not consider Jews to be part of the Dutch people.” The video taught about how life got worse and worse for Dutch Jews, and how the Frank family tried, unsuccessfully, to escape the Netherlands. Finally, when Anne’s sister Margot was called to a labor camp, the family, along with four others, went into hiding in the back of Anne’s father Otto’s jam factory building.
The recreation of the annex itself was fascinating. Its size was surprising: while not big enough for eight people to live comfortably in normal times, the annex did seem to have a good amount of room, with several bedrooms, a bathroom and a large kitchen.
This short part of the tour ended with information about the arrest of those in the annex. We next found ourselves standing on a raised glass floor above a map of Europe, with flags representing sites of mass killings, major concentration camps, extermination camps and major ghettos. This room wasn’t given as much time as it should have been, especially in comparison to the beginning of the exhibit. While the background history was important, there should have been more time spent speaking about the horrors of the war.
One of the few intense moments came at the end of this ghetto and final solution room. Information was given about what happened to each person who had hidden in the annex. Then, a picture of Anne’s kindergarten class, which had been hung up near the beginning of the exhibit, came back. A loud voice proclaimed that of the 32 children in the class, 15 were Jewish, and 10 of those were killed. The voice listed each child’s name, age at which they were killed and camp where they died. As each one was listed, their image was blacked out.
With a few exceptions, such as that picture, this exhibit seemed to skip nearly anything scary or tense. This last room, shoving in the ghettos and the final solution, did not give nearly as much information as it could have. When viewing the annex, there was not much of a sense that life there was terrifying.
The exhibit has a quote from Anne on its wall: “There were moments of laughter, but always amidst the fear of being discovered.” An important thing to understand, but the exhibit did not do a good job of capturing that fear. There were moments of intimidation, especially in the room with the huge video screens, but there was no real sense of fear or horror conveyed.
How intensely should museums in general portray the Holocaust? Each museum has a slightly different take on the question. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum takes the approach of leaving visitors feeling horrified by what they’ve seen. In contrast, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, where I am an intern, gives a sense of the horrors of the Holocaust, but in a much more restrained manner. I present some horrifying facts, but there’s usually only one or two places where students show real alarm. This Anne Frank exhibit seemed to skip all of that, leaving me initially disappointed. Shouldn’t the exhibit make patrons truly internalize the horrors of the Holocaust?
Maybe not. In chapter ten of her book People Love Dead Jews, Dara Horn wonders as to the purpose of people “knowing all of these obscene facts, in such granular detail.” Horn’s point is that the bar is too high; she explains that focusing on the extreme horrors of the Holocaust leaves room to excuse any acts of antisemitism that fall short of the supremely high bar of the Holocaust.
In this, Horn teaches why my initial desire to be shocked by a Holocaust exhibit is actually not the ideal. I wanted to be horrified by what people had to endure, but perhaps that speaks to my own desensitization. The Franks’ story, as told in the exhibition, was not a happy one. And yet, because it wasn’t as horrible as it could have been, I didn’t feel that it was so bad. There’s a danger here: If we view anything less than the absolute horrors of the Holocaust as “not such a big deal,” where do we draw the line? Are we complacent when faced with antisemitism in our lives today?
At the same time, we can’t let exhibits and education completely ignore the horrors of the Holocaust. It can be valuable to have intense wake-up calls, valuable to have reminders of how bad it can get.
The ending of the Anne Frank exhibition speaks to the tension here. The last few rooms in the exhibit detail “Otto Frank’s long journey home” and tell the story of the publication of Anne’s diary and what followed, including a play, a movie, over 70 translations, and over 30 million copies sold worldwide. A 1973 quote from Otto Frank leaves viewers with a reminder of the cruelty of humanity that the rest of the exhibit missed out on capturing: “Anne’s Diary made you think about the cruel persecution of the Jews during the Nazi regime, but I want to stress that even now there is in our world a lot of prejudice leading to discrimination and everyone of us should fight against it in his own circle.”
Horn might say that this highlights the importance of focusing on the now. Yes, the Holocaust was awful. But rather than leaving the exhibit shocked by and dwelling on the Nazis’ cruelty, we should focus on fighting against it in our own circles and lives.
But to contrast that, perhaps the exhibition should have given more of a sense of the cruel persecution that Otto mentions. If we don’t have a full understanding of the lengths to which people who act motivated by hate will go, can we fully appreciate Otto’s charge to fight the prejudice in our world?
Perhaps no conclusion exists to this question of how intense Holocaust exhibits should be. But whichever model of education an exhibition chooses to go with, the takeaway message should always be bringing the lessons into our own lives.