Anne Frank Statue stands at Founders Plaza of the National World War II Museum since September 12th, 2019.
Frank (1929-1945) was a teenage girl to a German-Jewish family in Amsterdam, Netherlands when the second World War began. On her 13th birthday, she got a notebook with a lock and decided to use it as a diary. In it, she described her life, wrote her feelings and thoughts.
When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and the restrictions for Jews increased, the family created the impression they left in a hurry to Switzerland and went into hiding in a secret annex above the warehouse of the company her father worked. Their only connection to the outside world was several loyal employees of her father, who took care of them.
In August 1944, the German police discovered them, sending them all to Auschwitz. Anne and her sister Martha were sent to a concentration camp where they both found their deaths only a few weeks before the war ended.
Her father, Otto, was the only survivor. When he came back to Amsterdam, a friend gave him a stack of papers she saved. Among them was Anne’s diary. In 1947, The Diary of a Young Girl was published and became one of the most famous testimonies of life under the Nazi regime.
The statue depicts 13-year-old Frank standing, holding her diary to her chest with both hands. Behind her is a granite bench with a quote from the diary – “Sometime this terrible war will be over. Surely the time will come when we are people again, and not just Jews.”
The New York sculpture firm, StudioEIS, created the statue from Anne’s pictures and a live model and actress who had appeared on the New York stage as Anne Frank. Among the many sculptures they created in the US are the Harriet Tubman statue at the Maryland Statehouse and the Virginia Women’s Monument.
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