After more than 12-months of preparation, the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand (HCNZ) has welcomed the exhibition Anne Frank: Let Me Be Myself into the country. Seen by over 80 million people globally, the exhibition will open a three-year tour of New Zealand at Auckland War Memorial Museum on Friday 9th February.
Chaired by Boyd Klap, organiser of the successful 2011 exhibition Anne Frank: A History for Today, this updated exhibition focusses on discrimination in the modern world, asking visitors to consider prejudice and intolerance, and to take ownership of the creation of a more respectful society.
With a New Zealand-specific education programme developed by Chris Harris, Director of Education for HCNZ, and clear sections about youth culture, the team behind the tour are hoping for a record audience nationwide of 100,000 young Kiwis, aged 14 to 25.
“I was a courier in the Dutch resistance when The Netherlands was liberated,” says Klap. “It seems to me the message of the holocaust has never been more important. We still have much to learn from stories like Anne’s.”
Anne Frank was just 12-years-old when she went into hiding with her family in a factory annexe in Amsterdam. The family lived in secret for three years, helped by non-Jewish friends, but were finally discovered and sent to concentration camps. Only her father Otto survived. He had the diary published a few years after the war in the hope people would learn from his daughter’s innocent words.