The Anne Frank travelling exhibition tells the story of Anne Frank and the Holocaust to people who are not able to visit the Anne Frank Museum in The Netherlands. The exhibition has come to New Zealand in February 2010 (see itinerary page for venue details) and will tour throughout the country for three years, visiting museums and community centres to teach people the story of Anne Frank and the Holocaust.

Anne Frank was one of more than one million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust.

Her family fled from Germany to Amsterdam after the Nazis seized power in 1933. In 1940 the Netherlands was occupied by Nazi-Germany. In 1942, the Germans and their Dutch collaborators began to round up Jews throughout the Netherlands.

Anne and her family went - with the help of four people who worked for Otto Frank – into hiding in a secret annex to the rear of Otto Frank’s factory. It would eventually also hide four other Jews for two years. They lived in this secret hiding place where Anne wrote her diary. This diary is now translated into 70 languages.

The family were betrayed and arrested in August 1944. They were taken to a concentration camp in Westerbork in the east of the Netherlands and from there were transported on the last train to Auschwitz. Anne and her sister Margot were then sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where they both died of typhus, in March 1945, just a few weeks before the war ended. Anne’s father Otto Frank was the only family member who survived.

Through her diary, Anne has become a symbol for the lost promise of children who died in the Holocaust.

The life history of Anne Frank and her family is the leading thread running through the exhibition Anne Frank - A History for Today. The family’s story is juxtaposed against world events before, during and after the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. The exhibition includes photographs of the Frank family and the other occupants of the Secret Annex and shows how people were persecuted by political decisions and by the actions of individuals. Implicit in the exhibit are the themes of bullying, anti-Semitism, racism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

The exhibition introduces visitors to the events leading up to World War II, and the government directed killing of Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, Slavs and others. The exhibit depicts individuals who chose to join the Nazi party and become perpetrators, those who were bystanders, as well as those who were willing to resist the Nazi tyranny.