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Anne Frank Center Brings Message of Tolerance Downtown

By Julie Shapiro | November 4, 2011 3:26pm
A rare replica of Anne Frank's diary is on display a the Anne Frank Center USA on Park Place.
A rare replica of Anne Frank's diary is on display a the Anne Frank Center USA on Park Place.
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DNAinfo/Julie Shapiro

LOWER MANHATTAN — When people ask Yvonne Simons, executive director of the Anne Frank Center USA, why Frank's story is still relevant today, Simons doesn't have to look much farther than her front door.

Simons just moved the museum, which commemorates the young diarist who died in the Holocaust, to a new Downtown location on Park Place, two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attacks and across the street from the Park51 Muslim community center.

"We are not only talking about the Holocaust and the Second World War. We are also talking about how these issues are at play today — the results of discrimination," Simons said Friday.

"We want to teach people about the consequences of intolerance," she said.

This week, the Anne Frank Center soft-opened its new 2,700-square-foot space in the base of the 100 Church St. office building. Although the final exhibits are not yet in place, the museum has already begun hosting school groups and public programs, to build interest in advance of the official opening in January 2012.

The highlight of the space will be a replica of Anne Frank's bedroom, the place where she spent two years in hiding and wrote the diary that became famous after her death at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the age of 15.

For now, a placeholder exhibit including excerpts of Frank's diary fills the center's main gallery. Photos that Otto Frank, Anne's father, took of his young family before the war line the walls, their carefree scenes made haunting due to the knowledge of what came next.

Simons is still working to raise the $800,000 needed to build out and staff the center's new home, which is much larger than its former outpost on the fifth floor of a building on Crosby Street.

"This gives us more visibility," Simons said from the windowed ground-floor space on Park Place.

On Friday, a group of 10th graders from the Hostos-Lincoln Academy of Science in the Bronx sat in the classroom on the center's lower level, listening with rapt attention as Sally Frishberg, 77, told her story.

During World War II, Frishberg and 14 relatives spent two years hiding in a Catholic man's attic in their native Poland. Frishberg remembers being unable to walk or talk, for fear of making any noise, and she remembers the deaths of her younger sister, her cousin and her aunt.

After being liberated in 1944, but finding that Jews were still unwelcome in Poland, Frishberg made her way to the United States and ultimately became a teacher. Now retired, she frequently speaks to school groups to tell them of the heroic risk taken by the man who hid her family.

"We who seem ordinary are not, if we put our minds and hearts to it," Frishberg told the students on Friday.

"Let's fight back. It is our responsibility."

For many of the students, it was their first time meeting a Holocaust survivor.

"I was paying attention the whole time," said Kwan Niblack, 15, from the Bronx.

"I don't know who could actually go through that. There was no reason to do that. People need to know."

Simons said one of the goals of the center, which is related to the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, is to help people find a personal connection to Frank's story.

When Simons joined the Anne Frank Center in 2005, she was still struggling to make sense of her experience on Sept. 11, when the towers came down around her.

"In that whole aftermath, [I could] not understand how people could hate each other so much," Simons said.

"My belief, and certainly that of Anne Frank, is that the world can't go on like this. The world can't go on with just the hatred. The world can only go on with peace and with acceptance of each other."

The Anne Frank Center USA is open Tuesdays through Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 44 Park Place. Upcoming programs include two film screenings, "The Evil Outside" at 6 p.m. Nov. 16 and "Between Heaven and Hell, Living with Camp Vught" at 6 p.m. Nov. 17, and a family program at noon Dec. 4.