Anne Frank in the World

The Anne Frank Stichting is heir to all photographic and personal material relating to Anne Frank and her family. It runs the famous Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and is in a unique position to compile a history of this kind. For many years the catalogue on which this book is based was used to accompany the Anne Frank in the World exhibition which travelled the globe, highlighting the ever-present dangers of racism today.

A much improved version of the identically titled catalogue published in 1985 to accompany a traveling exhibit, this volume joins an already large number of distinctive, accomplished books that magnify Anne Frank's experience to teach young readers about the climate in which she perished. While other titles (including the Anne Frank House's Anne Frank: Beyond the Diary by Ruud van der Rol and Rian Verhoeven) focus intimately on Anne Frank, this volume stresses history, detailing the rise of Nazism and its immediate effects on the Frank family. Photographs, several on every spread, tell even more of the story than does the compressed text. Readers see not only the by-now-familiar photos of the young Anne, but a view of a Jewish man, wearing the military decorations he earned fighting for Germany in WWI, standing outside his store in 1933 Cologne in response to the boycott of Jewish stores ordered by Goebbels; happy Dutch families with arms extended in a Heil Hitler; an anguished-looking naked girl, described as "mentally disabled," restrained by uniformed nurses right before she is to be killed through Hitler's "Euthanasia Project." The concluding sections, with views of Bosnian Muslims and Serbian soldiers, contemporary Ku Klux Klan rallies, a Londoner injured in an attack on a gay bar and other shocking instances of racism and racial crimes, explicitly connect prejudice with violence in an eloquent plea for tolerance. Ages 10-up.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.