New book by Ruth Franklin explores how Anne Frank, the German Jewish teenager killed in the Holocaust, became a cultural icon

The secret annex – one of the most famous dwellings in history, thanks to Frank’s best-selling published diary – can now be explored remotely, in New York.

For my bat mitzvah, my parents surprised me with a stop in Amsterdam — en route home from Israel to New Jersey — to visit the Anne Frank House. It was so many years ago that I’d be lying if I claimed to remember every detail.

Commemorating the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, an installation in New York tells the tragic story of the teenage girl and diarist, featuring a precisely scaled re-creation of the Amsterdam annex in which the Franks hid from the Nazis.

The Anne Frank annex recreation at the Center for Jewish History offers a rare opportunity for visitors unable to travel to Amsterdam where 1.2 million people visited the Anne Frank House in 2023. Demand for tickets to the New York exhibit is high, with weekend tickets already sold out through the exhibition’s April 30th closing date.

Replica: How do you recreate a world-famous symbol? An exhibition on the life of Anne Frank will open in New York on January 27, 2025, eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz. The rooms of the people in hiding are impeccably recreated.

The display is part of the first-ever full-scale replica of Frank’s annex — one that aims to introduce new audiences to the most famous victim of the Holocaust at a time when anxiety is high over whether its lessons have been learned.

The entire installation aims to examine Anne Frank’s life — and death — with a scope not often found in other treatments of this chapter in history.

The show, which opens on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, recreates the annex where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis.

BRANCHBURG — A traveling exhibition honoring the life and legacy of Anne Frank is now on display at Raritan Valley Community College in Branchburg. The “Anne Frank in Translation,” presented by the Institute of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at RVCC will be on display at the college’s library until May 15.

And yet, for all that, Anne Frank remains something of an abstraction, especially for the many who have never trekked to Amsterdam and the Anne Frank House museum, which houses hundreds of artifacts and personal items of the Frank family. It also contains the infamous secret annex hidden behind a bookcase, which has been carefully preserved.

A full-scale replica of the secret annex where Anne Frank penned her famous diary has opened in New York City.