Exhibit takes visitors inside the annex where Anne Frank lived

By Sarah Ventre

Published March 26, 2025 at 11:01 PM CDT

A replica of Anne Frank's bedroom that she shared with Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist in his 50s.

NEW YORK — The rooms are small and cramped, but they're full of the details that would make a house into a home: colorful rugs, neatly made beds, a board game on the table and even pictures of the British royal family on the wall.

But this isn't exactly a home — it's a re-creation of the annex where Anne Frank and her family hid from Nazis for more than two years. Currently on display at the Center for Jewish History in New York, it's the first time such an exhibit is available outside of Amsterdam.

The exhibit runs through the end of October.

The room of Hermann and Auguste van Pels. On table is a board game similar to the one given to their son Peter on his sixteenth birthday. It was one of the only forms of entertainment or play available in hiding.

In 1942, Anne's older sister Margot got a chilling notification.

"She receives a summons to report to a German labor camp, and she's instructed to be there the next day," said Michael Glickman, who is advising the Anne Frank House on the New York City exhibition and is the CEO of jMUSE.

That's when the Frank family decided to go into hiding.

While there, they had to abide by stringent rules in order to remain undetected. The windows had to be blacked out when the sun went down, they walked around in socks, and they even had to be careful about flushing the toilet.

But there are also remnants of regular family life on display, such as children's heights marked on the wall.

"As many parents have done over time, you've got these markings in your home showing the growth chart of your children," said Glickman. "Otto and Edith (Frank's parents) measured the girls in their time in hiding."

It wasn't just the Frank family who lived there. The van Pels family and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer, who shared a room with Anne, also lived in the annex.

As a teenage girl, sharing tight quarters with a middle-aged man meant lots of squabbles. And one prized possession in particular became a source of tension: their shared writing desk.

Fritz was studying Spanish because he hoped to move to South America and start a life after the war, while Anne was writing the diary that has now been translated into more than 75 languages and is still found in schools and libraries today.

A replica of the writing desk that Anne Frank fought over with her roommate in hiding — a dentist in his 50s. The desk is where she wrote her diary, which is still read today.

Just as Anne Frank's diary continues to evoke strong feelings, the visitors to the exhibit said the questions raised by her life and death still echo in our own time.

"Learning about Anne Frank in school, I didn't know that they tried to come to the U.S.," said Tracey Deyro, who lives in the Bronx, New York. "If you had to flee, where do you go?"

Marc Kreidler, who came with Deyro to see the exhibit, said there are parallels between what he saw in the museum exhibit, and what he sees happening around the world today.

"They said, 'Oh, the Jews were deported.' Right?" said Kreidler. "And there is talk about deporting people from our country right now to prisons elsewhere."

33-year-old Sarah Crawford lives in New York and said the exhibit helped her understand the story of the Holocaust in a deeper and more personal way.

"I think the reason that Anne Frank appeals to so many people is because it just humanizes this experience that otherwise is so overwhelming to think about on this massive population scale," said Crawford. "I think a lot of people can see themselves as a child in her."