JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
For the first time ever, a recreation of the Annex where Anne Frank and her family hid from Nazis is available outside of Amsterdam. NPR's Sarah Ventre walked through the exhibit, which is currently on display at the Center for Jewish History in New York, and she spoke with visitors who found its themes had strong reverberations for them in today's political climate.
SARAH VENTRE, BYLINE: Walking into the exhibit, there's a striking mix of the familiar and the unsettling.
MICHAEL GLICKMAN: And now we're entering the space in which, ultimately, eight people wind up living in.
VENTRE: Michael Glickman is an adviser to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Frank lived in a space just like this one with her parents, Otto and Edith, her sister Margot and four others. She was there for more than two years before they were discovered and killed.
GLICKMAN: They're forced, in 1942, to move the family at the time that Margot is - she receives a summons to report to a German labor camp, and she's instructed to be there the next day.
VENTRE: So instead, the family went into hiding in something that looks a bit like a small, cramped apartment. The rooms are packed with the kind of details that are reminiscent of so many homes.
GLICKMAN: As many parents have done over time, you've got these markings in your home showing the growth chart of your children. And so Otto and Edith measured the girls in their time in hiding.
VENTRE: There are colorful rugs, neatly made beds and even posters on the wall.
GLICKMAN: Anne is fascinated by the royal family, and you'll see images of Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth. She enjoys art, and you have work by DaVinci and other artists. She's a teenage girl.
VENTRE: As a teenage girl, Anne Frank had to share her bedroom with a dentist, Fritz Pfeffer, who was 53 years old when he moved in. And in those tight quarters, their shared writing desk became a prized possession.
GLICKMAN: Fritz and Anne are constantly arguing over who gets to use the desk.
VENTRE: Fritz was studying Spanish, because he hoped to move to South America after the war. And Anne was writing the diary that has now been translated into more than 75 languages and is still found in countless schools and libraries. Just as Anne Frank's diary continues to evoke strong feelings, the visitors to the exhibit say the questions raised by her life and death echo in our own time. Tracey Deyro came from the Bronx to see the exhibit.
TRACEY DEYRO: Learning about Anne Frank at school, like, I didn't know that they tried to come to the U.S. So when you think about, like, oh, if you had to flee, it's like, where do you go, you know? What if, like, other countries are not taking you? Like, where do you go now?
VENTRE: Marc Kreidler says there are parallels between what he saw in the exhibit and what he sees happening around us today.
MARC KREIDLER: They said, oh, the Jews were deported - right? - somewhere. And there is talk about deporting people from our country right now to prisons elsewhere.
VENTRE: Thirty-three-year-old Sarah Crawford lives in New York.
SARAH CRAWFORD: I mean, 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. I think a lot of people can see themselves as a child in her.
VENTRE: The exhibit runs through the end of October.
Sarah Ventre, NPR News, New York.
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