Museum Pays Tribute to Young Girl’s Courage

Picture two smiling, pretty young girls in bathing suits enjoying a day at the beach in 1940. The image seems innocent enough. But their bright smiles defy the reality in Europe at the time as Adolf Hitler’s massive army was overtaking the continent and heading toward the annihilation of its Jews.

Those girls were Anne and Margot Frank. Soon after that picture was taken, they and their family would go into hiding in the attic of a warehouse to escape the persecution of Jews, only to die several years later in German concentration camps.

Anne Frank kept a diary during her years in hiding. Overlooked by the Nazis when they raided the Franks’ hiding place in 1944, it was given to her father after the war and published as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.”

The Frank family story, told in photographs and letters, is on display at the “Anne Frank in the World” exhibit which opens today and runs through June 2 at the Fullerton Museum Center.

Created by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the exhibit opened in 1985 and has toured the world. The Fullerton exhibit, organized by the Orange County Anne Frank Organizing Committee, will also feature lectures from Holocaust survivors, readings from the diary and a tribute to Armenian genocide victims of 1915.

The exhibit, designed to familiarize school children with the Holocaust, is a maze of enormous plastic screens with blown-up photos chronicling the stories of the Frank family and the rise of National Socialism in Europe.

At a benefit opening of the exhibit Thursday, one woman stood in awe at how closely the Holocaust came to her own family.

“My mother was a refugee who escaped Germany,” said Lisa Rosen, 32. “Although my mother always felt a great kinship with Anne Frank, she didn’t want me to read her diary. She wanted to protect me from the cruelty of the world. But, I read it anyway and I remember it made me cry a lot.”

The photographs, as well as the first edition of Anne Frank’s diary and a yellow Star of David that Jews were required to wear, are somber reminders of the dark days in Europe during World War II.

Little did Anne Frank know that her beloved diary would one day sell millions of copies, inspire plays, exhibits and a motion picture, and immortalize her words “What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.”

“I was a teenager when her diary came out,” said Elizabeth Hammond, a Laguna Hills resident who attended the exhibit. “She spoke to the world with her writing.”

The exhibit also details the rise of Nazi party membership in other European countries.

For Jenny Unterman, who is a volunteer docent at the exhibit and lives in Huntington Beach, the display on Dutch-Nazi collaboration held special significance.

At the age of 5, Unterman and her sister were sent into hiding when the Germans invaded Holland. For two years, Unterman was moved to various strangers’ homes and was saved from the Holocaust. Although her sister also survived, she never saw her parents again.

“The Dutch didn’t do as much for Jews as they could have done,” she said. “There was resistance, but there were also sympathizers.

“But you have to ask yourself, would you hide somebody? Would you risk your own life?”

The fate of some German resistance movement leaders, such as Hans and Sophie Scholl, the young brother and sister who led the White Rose resistance movement, and Helmut Hubener, a teenager who distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, are also memorialized in the exhibit. All three were executed.

The display does not end with World War II, but also shows current neo-Nazi movements and the resurgence in fascism in several European countries today.

Pointing to a photograph of a little girl standing beneath a sign stating “No Jews Allowed,” Lisa Rosen said: “That could have been my mom. That could have been me. All of this is still relevant today.”

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