Walk Through a Full-Scale Replica of the Secret Annex Where Anne Frank’s Family Took Shelter During the Holocaust

At the height of World War II, Anne Frank spent more than two years cooped up with her family in a secret annex in Amsterdam. While hiding from the Nazis, the young girl filled the pages of her now-iconic diary.

For decades, travelers have been able to see the Frank family’s hideout by visiting the Anne Frank House, a biographical museum created in the 1950s in collaboration with her father, Otto Frank. The Amsterdam museum is one of the most famous historical sites in the Netherlands, welcoming more than 1.2 million visitors each year.

Now, for the first time ever, a full-scale replica of the secret annex will open on foreign soil. “Anne Frank the Exhibition” will debut at the Center for Jewish History in New York City on January 27, 2025—which is also International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The show will mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The 7,500-square-foot, one-story exhibition will take visitors on a journey through time, starting with Frank’s childhood in Frankfurt. Using more than 100 original artifacts and multimedia elements, it will also explore the Nazis’ rise to power and Otto Frank’s experiences during the postwar years.

The real secret annex in Amsterdam is empty, per Otto Frank’s request. But the New York replica will be outfitted with some of the Franks’ furnishings.

“We feel that this will bring audiences who are not necessarily familiar with the story closer to that history and closer to Anne Frank,” Ronald Leopold, the Anne Frank House’s executive director, tells the New York Times’ Laurel Graeber.

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After the replica annex is constructed in the Netherlands, it will be shipped across the Atlantic to New York. Frank’s famous diary will not be making the journey.

“We unfortunately will not be able to travel with the diary, writings, the notebooks and the loose sheets that Anne wrote,” Leopold tells the Associated Press’ Mike Corder. “They are too fragile, too vulnerable to travel.”

Frank was born in 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, to parents Otto and Edith Frank. Less than four years later, Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor and began orchestrating what became known as the Holocaust.

The Frank family moved to the Netherlands to escape persecution in the mid-1930s. In July 1942, the Nazis ordered Anne’s older sister, Margot, to return to Germany and report to a labor camp. Instead, the family went into hiding.

Their hiding spot was the secret annex at Prinsengracht 263, where Otto Frank ran his pectin-trading business. Soon, they were joined by the van Pels family and dentist Fritz Pfeffer, which brought the total number of people in the cramped space to eight. The group remained there for more than two years, with colleagues and friends supplying food, clothing and reading materials.

On August 4, 1944, police raided the annex and arrested all of its occupants. Anne and Margot Frank were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died around March 1945. Edith Frank died at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in January 1945.

Otto Frank was the only member of the family to survive. After the war, Miep Gies, one of the helpers who had hidden the family, gave him Anne’s diary and writings.

“At first, he could not summon the courage to read them, but once he started, he was gripped by her writing,” according to the Anne Frank House.

He began sharing passages with family and friends. Two years after the war ended, her diary was published in Dutch and eventually translated into many other languages.

The exhibition will explore Anne Frank’s lasting legacy “not just as a victim, but through the multifaceted lens of a life, as a teenage girl, as a writer, as a symbol of resilience and of strength,” Leopold tells the AP.

“We hope that [visitors] will contemplate the context that shaped her life,” he adds.

“Anne Frank the Exhibition” will be on view at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, New York, from January 27, 2025, to April 30, 2025.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.