Anne Frank would have been 96 years old this month. In honour of the famous teen diarist and Holocaust victim’s birthday, Anne Frank: The Exhibition — which is on view at the Center for Jewish History — is giving out 10,000 copies of her book, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.
Commonly known as The Diary of Anne Frank, the books will be distributed to students and families throughout the five boroughs all summer, until supplies run out.
“The Diary of Anne Frank is not just relevant — it is essential for young New Yorkers today,” Gavriel Rosenfeld, the president of the Center for Jewish History, said in a statement. “Anne’s story is a powerful mirror reflecting the dangers of antisemitism and hatred that persist in our world.”
Anne Frank: The Exhibition opened in January in New York City to sold-out crowds. It’s the first-ever full-scale replica of Frank’s secret annex — the attic apartment in Amsterdam where Frank, her family, and four other Jews hid from the Nazis for more than two years before being discovered.
The exhibition — which has been extended through October — recreates, in painstaking detail, what life was like for the eight Jewish residents of the annex, down to minute details like peeling wallpaper and the photos tacked to the walls.
It includes more than 100 original artifacts related to the Frank family, many of which have never before been shown publicly. These include a Dutch version of Monopoly — a game Anne Frank loved, which she had played with a classmate at Amsterdam’s Jewish Lyceum. They also include a 1947 letter from a New York publisher to her father, Otto Frank, declining to publish the soon-to-be world-famous diary of his murdered daughter.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl has been published in more than 70 languages.
