STATEMENT FROM LEVIEN ROUW,
MANAGER OF EDUCATION AT THE ANNE FRANK HOUSE
The educational departments of the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Anne Frank House have now been co-operating successfully for more than a decade. We have exchanged knowhow regarding many different aspects of our work: we have organised joint training seminars for teachers from Poland and the Netherlands and we have shared our efforts to reach out to schools and educators in both countries. Our two institutions have many things in common: the diary of Anne Frank and Auschwitz have both become symbols of how millions of innocent people, mostly Jews, were murdered during the Holocaust and the significance of this genocide for contemporary society. ‘Anne Frank’ and ‘Auschwitz’ have become metaphors, used correctly and sometimes inappropriately by many to point to the various types of injustices being perpetrated in today’s world. Every year both museums receive more than one million visitors from all over the world.
The fact that many of these visitors have only limited historical knowledge and visit these sites as part of a tourist visit to Poland or the Netherlands presents a common challenge for both museums. How do we create exhibitions and educational programmes that provide visitors with sufficient context? How do we balance commemoration and education? How do we create an atmosphere that enables people to relate to the fate of individuals who lived such a long time ago? How can we make this history relevant to young people today? Both our institutions work carefully to find appropriate answers to these questions. What makes our efforts even more challenging is that we are acutely aware of the fact that there are many who have strong connections to the history that we bring to the public, and who critically monitor the results of our work.
The personal story of Anne Frank connects our two sites: after being arrested in August 1944 and after spending a month in the Dutch transit camp Westerbork, Anne Frank was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Together with her family she was on the very last train that left the Netherlands for Auschwitz. From her diary we know that she understood very well what was taking place in the extermination camps. She spent almost two months in the barracks in Birkenau, together with her sister Margot, before she was sent to Bergen-Belsen. This is where she eventually died at the end of February 1945. Anne’s mother, Edith Frank, died in Auschwitz in January 1945.