World Jewish News

Madame Tussauds in Berlin adds Anne Frank wax figure

Madame Tussauds museum in Berlin has opened a new exhibit featuring a wax figure of Anne Frank, the 13-year-old girl whose diary describing her Jewish family's experiences hiding from Nazi persecution in Amsterdam has become one of the most widely read books in the world.
She died at age 15 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp about a month before the camp’s liberation in April 1945.
The girl is depicted smiling, sitting at her desk, a pen in hand. She is surrounded by some of her favorite things: magazines about the latest trends in cinema and theater and a copy of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," a book she loved.
Thomas Heppener, director of the Anne Frank Center in Berlin, which aims to promote the memory of Anne Frank and which collaborated on the project, officially opened the exhibit on Friday.
As well as the wax figure of Anne Frank herself, the exhibit includes a simulation of her room in the secret annex of the house where the family hid during the German occupation of the Netherlands.
"For us, the most important thing was to paint a complete picture," museum spokeswoman Nina Zerbe told Der Spiegel magazine. "We wanted to show Anne Frank in the context in which she lived."
Not everyone has been pleased with the decision by museum to add Anne Frank to its repertoire, according to the Bild newspaper. Some have said it is inappropriate to include a Holocaust victim at such an unserious location, while others have maintained it is fine as long as information is included about her life and death.
According to Der Spiegel, in a chilling irony, the wax figure of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, which the museum controversially re-introduced after it was beheaded by a visitor shortly after the Berlin Madame Tussauds opened in 2008, is in the next room.
The Tussauds museum is located on the city's famous Unter den Linden boulevard.

EJP