10/17/2009
Docents trained for Frank exhibit
Reprinted with permission from The News Dispatch

Alicia Ebaugh
The News-Dispatch

MICHIGAN CITY - Before Anne Frank became the most well-known victim of the Holocaust during World War II, she was like every other little girl. She went to the beach with her family. She dreamed of becoming a movie star.

Anne especially loved to pose for pictures, taken by her father, Otto Frank. Dozens of candid photographs he took before the family went into hiding in 1942 held memories of her youth, time spent with her sister, Margo, cousins and friends.

Although the diary Anne Frank kept while in hiding is now widely read in countries all over the world, these pre-war photographs were believed to be lost forever, said Hilary Eddy Stipelman, program manager for Anne Frank Center USA in New York City. But a photo album containing many of these pre-war photographs of the Frank family was found in the early 1990s in the cushions of a couch at the Annex, the family's hiding place in Amsterdam, she said.

"They really provide a glimpse of what their life was like before the horrors of war," Stipelman said. "They are essentially the last pictures we have of Anne Frank."

Now in the possession of the Anne Frank Center, reproductions of these family photos have become part of a traveling exhibit, which is on display for the first time in northern Indiana at the Lubeznik Center for the Arts, 101 W. Second St. The exhibit runs through Nov. 17, with an opening reception from 7 to 9 tonight. Over the past three days, Stipelman was in Michigan City to train several area volunteers as guides for group tours through the display.

"The goal is to get people to connect with Anne's experience," Stipelman told a group of volunteers Friday. "Having this connection through her photos makes her loss so tangible to us. You know that 11 million people were killed in the Holocaust, but how do you visualize a number? Here, we see a lot of ourselves in her. It brings her death home."

Volunteers were told to have their groups, which will be anywhere from elementary and middle-school classes to military veterans' organizations, focus on three or four of the pictures and relate them to their own lives.

"You need to be prepared to answer questions, especially from the children," Stipelman told the group, which included Marquette High School Principal Jim White and Judy Jacobi, Purdue University-North Central assistant vice chancellor of marketing. "They will want to know how Anne died. They'll want to know why."

Mike Bell, 81, a Lubeznik Center board member who was part of the training, said watching these black-and-white photos of Anne Frank and her family being hung in the main gallery was an emotional experience for him.

"I lived through this period of anti-Semitism, and it was strong even in America," Bell said. "As a Jewish-American, I had a strong desire to assimilate. I didn't want to stick out."

The Holocaust is far from ancient history, Bell said, especially for him. Bell is only nine months older than Anne Frank would be right now had she survived.

The most important thing for anyone to reflect on while touring the exhibit, Stipelman said, is how we can make sure atrocities like the Nazi concentration camps don't happen again.

"There no words to convey the perception of loss, what it's like to have your entire family ripped away from you, but this picture does it," she said, pointing to the final picture that groups will be led to view. In it, Otto Frank is seen leaning against a post inside the Annex in the years following his wife's and daughters' deaths in concentration camps. "The importance and bravery of Otto's decision to publish Anne's diary was immense. As tragic as the Holocaust is, Anne's story brings us a message of hope, of goodness in the world. It is our job to carry it on."

These images of Anne Frank show her as a happy, healthy girl, the last of them taken when she was 12. But once the Franks entered the Annex, Otto Frank stopped taking pictures. The family was split up after they were betrayed to the Nazi administration Aug. 4, 1944. After spending seven months in concentration camps, Anne and her sister died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen.

Their father was the only one of the eight residents of the Annex to survive. He never picked up a camera again.