Anne exhibition tells a human story for all times
By Bruce Emond
JAKARTA (JP): You know the story: Young Jewish girl, cooped up in a secret loft in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during World War II, fights her loneliness and boredom by putting pen to paper to share her innermost thoughts.
Her scribblings, penned to an anonymous "friend", Kitty, are a reflection of the emotional turmoil of adolescence, at times touching in their innocence and the yearning to know more about a life denied to her, at others disarmingly childish or dark in the perceptions of those around her, particularly the "idiots" -- adults.
Yet they also bear witness to the terrible times she lived in, of a venal regime and people she never fully understood as they exacted their evil grand design for the destruction of the "other".
A few years later, after she was captured and sent to her death at the age of 16 at the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, her diary was found, some of the more personal content cleaned up a bit by her father, the sole survivor of her immediate family, and published to amazing success the world over.
It has been given the Hollywood treatment at least twice (a new made-for-TV movie was screened in the U.S. recently) and is still assigned reading in many classrooms in the United States and Europe.
On a fundamental level the life of one of the world's most famous diarists -- currently the subject of the exhibition Anne Frank: A History of Today at Erasmus Huis -- is a universal human story of our times. An international traveling exhibition that has been shown in 560 cities in 30 countries, the exhibition is at once moving, disturbing (it is not recommended for preteens) and a celebration of a beautiful human spirit.
Take away the historical context, remove the famous name and the story we are all familiar with, and Anne Frank could be any of the world's people, from Serbia to Palestine to Afghanistan, who are enduring persecution and discrimination due to who and what they are.
The exhibition uses photographs and passages from the diary to take a chronological look at Anne's life and the larger political and social developments which shaped it.
The panels of photographs trace the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany where she was born in 1929 into a well-off family; her family's flight to the Netherlands with the persecution of Jews and other minorities in her homeland; the growing realization that they were not even safe in their new home with the Nazi annexation of other countries in western and eastern Europe; their decision to go into hiding; their arrest and deportation to the death camps scattered around Europe and, finally, the reaction to the publication of the diary.
The photographs and accompanying text are affecting on many levels, with images of burned-out synagogues, of Jews being beaten in the streets, of a Jewish man and his "Aryan" girlfriend being publicly humiliated for daring to love each other, all contrasted with photographs of the young, exuberant Anne.
Anne writes about having to wear the yellow star identifying Jews ("because we are Jews we had to leave Germany" she confides with the matter of factness of youth) and tells of the sympathetic looks from ordinary Dutch citizens after Jews were barred from using transportation, including their own cars, by the Nazis. Poignantly, before the family is forced into hiding, she writes about the one ice-cream parlor in town which still permits Jews to dine there.
It is a world away in geography and period, but we do not have to look far to find examples close to home of people butchering others simply because they are a different ethnic group, religion or race -- Bergen-Belsen 1945 could just as well be Sampit 2001.
A CD-ROM also allows visitors to the exhibition to enter the claustrophobic world of the annex, located above the office of Anne's father and today the Anne Frank Museum. Click on an image, such as a pile of magazines at the foot of Anne's bed, and details are provided on this particular aspect of the occupants' lives.
There are so many "what ifs" about the life of Anne Frank (what if her family had fled to Britain or the U.S., like her father's brothers, instead of the Netherlands? What if they had survived undetected in the final few months of the war instead of being caught and dispatched on the last death train out of the Netherlands). As it is, and what we must be thankful for, is that she left us a story which still echoes with such powerful relevance today.
Anne Frank: A History of Today is at Erasmus Huis, Jl. HR Rasuna Said Kav. S-3, Kuningan, South Jakarta, until June 16. Call 524-1069 for more information.