Anne Frank’s House as Memorial and Metaphor
by Rabbi Donna Berman, Ph.D.
In 2007, at Charter Oak, we created a life-size replica of Anne Frank’s Secret Annex, in our gallery. So that you can picture it: When you walked into the gallery, you saw before you, two white sheet-rock walls at a right angle to one another. Affixed to these walls were two parallel timelines—one depicting milestones in the life of the Frank family, the other, below it, depicting milestones in Hitler’s rise to power. The timelines wrapped around the structure and ended up at a bookcase, the famous secret entrance to the Frank’s apartment.
When people pushed on the bookcase, it swung open and they found themselves in a different world–a pretty darn good facsimile of the apartment, furnished as it was furnished when the Franks lived there (or as close as we could get to that). We had scoured antique stores throughout Connecticut and Massachusetts, looking for pieces that resembled the furniture we found in pictures of the apartment. We even found an old pull toilet (that I transported in the back seat of my car!). We went so far as to find the photographs of movie stars Anne had on her bedroom walls and shoes and clothing to place in the rooms from that period.*
Over the course of the weeks that the exhibit was in our gallery it occurred to me that this wasn’t just a model of the Frank’s Secret Annex. It was a representation of what the antidote to prejudice is: opening up doors and looking inside to discover what’s within a person, the multitudes they contain, to paraphrase Walt Whitman. It is the willingness to look beyond what’s on the surface–skin color, sexuality, religion, language, gender, socio-economic status. When we take the time to do this, to truly know someone, hate becomes much more difficult to muster.
All these years later, that exhibit lives on in my heart and mind. 2025 is certainly a very different historical moment than 2007. What can that exhibit teach us today?
I think its message of not taking things at face value is more vital than ever. I think its message of making sure we open doors and look deeply into things is terribly important, a crucial reminder that we must not take the easy way out in gathering information, that we must be critical thinkers, especially now, in an age of a tsunami of propaganda meant to manipulate us and curated news meant to confirm our already established beliefs.
Sherry Turkle the MIT sociologist who studies the impact of technology on society (and happens to be my cousin) writes about a study done on empathy. The study showed that the key ingredient of empathy is time–time for consideration, for reflection, time to think and feel. From this, one can glean that a society that moves at the speed of light, like ours, will inevitably see a decline in empathy among its citizens. This may explain some of our polarization. And, I would argue, that time, in addition to being a building block of empathy, is an essential ingredient for coming to wise decisions and for the kind of analysis critical thinking requires.
So what do we do? Well, I would suggest, we have to change our relationship with time. We have to “make time.” We have to slow down and give ourselves room to “be with”–to be with ourselves, with our loved ones, to be with the information we are receiving, to be with the information we must actively seek. It means, we have to open doors and not be satisfied with surface impressions. Now, this is not a quick fix. This takes concerted effort. In practical terms, it means reading things we might not ordinarily read, seeking out authors and artists, musicians and filmmakers whose cultures, ethnicities, religions, gender, sexuality, places of origin, political views are different from our own. We have to be intentional in seeking out ways to expand our worldview. This is how we build the muscle of empathy, of seeing things from other perspectives, an ability that can help us not just be better citizens of this country and of the world, but better workers and neighbors, more compassionate family members and more understanding partners and friends.
Now, the challenge is that a beautiful, broad vista of thoughts and feelings sounds great, but it can feel frightening because familiar, small spaces can feel safe. The rabbis point out that the word for Egypt in Hebrew is Mitzrayim at the center of which is the word “tzar” which means “narrow.” We can all get stuck in our narrow, familiar places, in our own Egypts, our own places of captivity, the Rabbis warn us. Out in the open space, long-held beliefs will more than likely be challenged. We might suddenly see things we intentionally avoided seeing because they were too painful. It can feel like an intellectual and emotional earthquake and that’s scary. But the trade-off is that we get to know something bigger, something greater, something more real, filled with more creativity, more possibility.
As we were building the Anne Frank house, we were visited by three boys from the neighborhood who had a question about classes in our City School of the Arts and I asked them if they wanted a sneak preview of what we were making.
I took them into the gallery and asked if they knew who Anne Frank was. They did not. I asked them if they knew what the Holocaust was. They did not. I took them through the house as I told them about Anne Frank’s life and their eyes got very big. “Is this story true?” they asked, incredulous. “Yes,” I said and then I asked these children, for whom reading was not a favorite pastime, “If we got you Anne Frank’s diary, would you read it?” “Yes, Miss,” they said, immediately.
And then on the night of the opening of the exhibit, these same boys came back with their friend. They went inside the house and I overheard them telling the other boy the story of Anne Frank. When they emerged from the house, they asked if I could get their friend a copy of the diary, too. This little boy said he really wanted to read it. And so, with the help of two very kind donors, we purchased copies of The Diary of Anne Frank and gave them out to the children in our neighborhood. Those children were willing to open the door.
Here’s my prayer: That we may have the wisdom possessed by those boys who entered the Anne Frank house, that we may have the courage they demonstrated to explore new places and open up to new experiences and see things never seen before or long avoided. That, like them, we may invest the time to do this. Because this is how we grow. This is how we build bridges. This is how we create a society where difference is not feared but appreciated and understood as dimensionality, as texture, as richness, as gift. This is how we thrive. This is how we love.
*The Center for Jewish History is currently hosting “Anne Frank: The Exhibition” in Manhattan. It includes a full-scale replica of the Annex. https://www.annefrankexhibit.org/exhibition
To view images from Charter Oak’s 2007 exhibition of The Anne Frank Secret Annex, please click the video below.