Bringing Anne Frank’s Secret Annex to New York, and the World

The children seem like typical kindergartners: Some beam at the camera; some glance coyly aside; others appear lost in reverie. One slim, dark-haired girl in a pale dress looks precociously serious.

She is Anne Frank, and this classroom photograph, taken at a Montessori school in Amsterdam in 1935, appears twice in “Anne Frank the Exhibition,” a 7,500-square-foot multimedia installation that opens on Monday — International Holocaust Remembrance Day — for a three-month stay at the Center for Jewish History in New York before traveling to other cities.

Visitors first see the picture in one of the exhibition’s introductory rooms, before they walk through the show’s core: the first full-scale re-creation of the secret annex that was the Amsterdam hiding place of eight Jews, including the Frank family, from July 1942 to August 1944. In those cramped, cloistered spaces, Anne wrote her famous diary.

When viewers encounter the kindergarten photograph again, this time as an animation, it delivers a gutting blow: As an audio track reveals their names, their ages at death and the places where they were killed, 10 of the classroom’s Jewish children, one by one, turn into black silhouettes and disappear from the picture, their images erased as swiftly and summarily as the Nazis ended their lives.

Appearing after the annex, this animation introduces “a very personal, intimate, heartbreaking element of schoolchildren who were murdered for no other reason than the fact that they were Jewish,” said Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, as he walked amid cables and boxes during the New York show’s construction.