Anne Frank House to recreate annex where Frank hid for years for NYC exhibition

An exhibit that recreates the “secret annex” – where Anne Frank and her family lived in hiding from 1942 to 1944 before they were discovered by Nazi police – will open at the Center for Jewish History in Union Square in January.

This marks the first time that the Anne Frank House Museum in the Netherlands has done such a full-scale recreation of the space where Frank lived and wrote her famous diary.

The Anne Frank House Museum is one of Europe's most visited historical sites, and tickets are difficult to obtain despite the museum's daily operating hours of 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. It's bringing the first-of-its-kind exhibition to New York in order to expand the international reach of Frank's story, Executive Director Ronald Leopold said in a Zoom interview from Amsterdam.

“With ever fewer Holocaust survivors in our communities, and with the devastating rise in antisemitism and other forms of group hatred, I feel that the responsibility of the Anne Frank House has never been greater,” Leopold said. “It’s a time that is very relevant to learn about Anne Frank’s story.”

The museum chose New York for its first recreation of the annex because of the ties between the city and Frank’s story: Her father Otto, the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust, had befriended an American roommate, Nathan Straus Jr., while at Heidelberg University in Germany in 1908. Afterward, Straus’ father invited Otto Frank to come to New York to work at Macy’s, his Herald Square department store.

Frank’s diary achieved global acclaim after a young editorial assistant in Paris rescued the French-language version from the reject pile and convinced the New York branch of her employer, Doubleday, to publish it in English.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning stage adaptation opened on Broadway in 1955 and ran for two years, garnering four Tony nominations and the award for Best Play. In 1959, a film adaptation won three Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actress for Shelley Winters, who donated the statuette to the Anne Frank House Museum.

That Academy Award will return to New York as one of more than 100 rare artifacts in the exhibition, Leopold said. He added that many of the artifacts have never been shown in public before.

The museum's many programs include yearlong educational programs with Dutch police, which focus on tolerance and discrimination within the force and in their work, Leopold said.

“We would love to welcome the New York City police,” he said. “The story of Anne has always had a huge appeal to learn not just the specific history, but also learning about the way human beings make choices in their lives and the consequences of those choices for themselves and for others.”

The Anne Frank “secret annex” recreation will open at the Center for Jewish History in Union Square on Jan. 27, 2025, and run through April 30.