The one-off exhibition marks Holocaust Memorial Day, reports Miriam Balanescu

A special exhibition honouring the life of Anne Frank has launched today in Wood Green.

Anne Frank: A History for Today is a collaboration between the Anne Frank Trust in Amsterdam and Commerce House, where the exhibition is held.

The exhibition consists of forty panels recalling the life of Anne Frank, a young German-born Jewish girl who hid with her family in an attic to escape Nazi persecution during World War II. She was discovered by Nazi officers and died tragically in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her diary which she kept during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands has prompted multiple film and television adaptations.

The exhibition culminates as a result of a dialogue between the Anne Frank Trust and the student ambassadors at Commerce House, who created the exhibition as an educational resource to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on Friday, 27^th January.

A special Holocaust Memorial Event, led by the student ambassadors, is due to take place at Commerce House on Thursday, 26th January at 3.30pm.

Laura Katan, a teacher at Haringey Learning Partnership who has supported the exhibition, said: “The exhibition is a selection of photographs from the Frank family and the build-up to World War II, including maps of important places and excerpts of Anne’s diary and quotes from her father. A new investigation has identified a suspect who may have betrayed the Frank family to the Nazis in 1944, after they spent two years hiding in Amsterdam. The exhibition details this story using different forms of engaging media.

“The exhibition educates us on the segregation and discriminatory laws at the time, and the danger of being discovered as Jewish. We ultimately learn of Anne Frank’s death, teaching us the horror of genocide and how it can take an innocent child’s life, amongst millions of others.

“We know that there have been other instances of genocide across the world since the Holocaust. By honouring Holocaust Memorial Day, we not only remember and honour the six million lives lost during the Holocaust, but we draw attention to the other genocides around the world which have claimed so many more lives. By educating our community, we hope to raise awareness of these atrocities and stand up to hate and discrimination in the first instance wherever we witness it in our lives.”

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