Passages from Anne Frank's diary as well as from her family's personal collection will complement other haunting Holocaust relics and testimony from Holocaust survivors, in an exhibit opening Saturday at Minnetrista.
"Anne Frank: A History for Today" will be on display Saturday until Jan. 20. The exhibit will correspond with "B'ruchim Habaim: Midwestern Sanctuary" on display in the Indiana Room in Minnetrista's lobby.
Visitors will walk away with a more in-depth understanding of the Holocaust but should come with a little background of Frank's story because of its emotional intensity, Minnetrista marketing manager Amanda Hicks said.
A photographic essay by former Muncie resident Elizabeth Leeor is a Minnetrista original and depicts the Jewish temples of East Central Indiana.
"[The exhibit] is very thought-provoking and emotional," she said.
Anne Frank was 15 years old when she died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, nine months after she and her family were arrested by Nazi soldiers in the Netherlands.
Frank's diary, which chronicles her experiences and suffering up until her final moments, was saved during the war by one of the family's helpers, Miep Gies, and was first published in 1947, according to the Anne Frank Center, USA.
"It was such a chance that her diary was preserved and returned to her father," English professor Frank Felsenstein said.
Her diary has been translated into 67 languages and is one of the most widely read books in the world.
Felsenstein has taught "Remembering the Holocaust," an honors colloquium, three times since his tenure began at Ball State University. It includes Frank's diaries in his course syllabus. He plans to teach the course again in the spring, he said.
In some ways, he said, his family's background is not much different than that of the Frank family: Felsenstein's mother grew up in Frankfurt, Germany and studied medicine at the university. She was one of first German-Jews to be able to escape in 1933 to England.
Otto Frank and his family spent 25 months during World War II in an annex of rooms above his office in Amsterdam, but as history would have it, they were not as fortunate as some of Felsenstein's ancestors.
On Sept. 3, 1944, the group was deported on what would be the last transport from the Netherlands to the Auschwitz concentration camp. On Oct. 28, 1944, selections began for women to be relocated to Bergen-Belsen, separating Anne and her sister Margot from their father, Otto.
"Many people think that had [Anne] known he was still alive she might have had the moral and physical strength to pull through," he said.
As horrible and as atrocious as the Holocaust was, it creates a certain fascination for people - one that should not be forgotten, he said.
"Present-day students will be the last generation to meet [survivors] and talk to them first hand about their experiences," he said. "To witness directly or to speak with someone who witnessed the Holocaust makes it much more real and, of course, more disturbing."
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