Anne Frank's poignant tale comes to Te Papa

PHIL REID/The Dominion Post

VIVID MEMORIES: Boyd Klap, who remembers the persecution of Jews during World War II, helped bring the exhibition on the life of Anne Frank to Te Papa.

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The story of Anne Frank so touched Boyd Klap that he was moved to help bring an exhibition of the world's most famous Holocaust victim to New Zealand.

Anne Frank's life, made famous by the diary she wrote while in hiding in Amsterdam, reminds him of his own World War II experiences when Hitler's army invaded the Netherlands.

Mr Klap, who is 83, just three years older than Anne would have been if she were still alive, remembers the day German troops rode through his home town of Deventer.

A teenager at the time, he recalls that Jewish neighbours – a couple and their young son – were deported to a concentration camp in Germany and that his wife Ria's family kept a young German Jewish man hidden in their home throughout the war.

"So it was very easy for me to pick up the challenge of putting this [exhibition] together," Mr Klap said.

The opportunity to tour the exhibition, which opens to the public at Te Papa on Thursday and was curated by the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, arose two years ago when a member of the Dutch museum's staff was in Wellington.

Mr Klap, a retired Wellington businessman, raised more than $250,000 in sponsorships from the Lottery Grants Board, the Dutch, German and Israeli embassies, Dutch-based Rabobank, individual sponsors and other supporters.

The exhibition will be officially opened tomorrow night by Prime Minister John Key. It will be at Te Papa for six weeks before going to Auckland and to other venues throughout the country.

Entry to the exhibition is free and it is targeted at secondary school pupils the same age as Anne Frank when she wrote her diary.

"This history is so important to all of us because we need to learn from history that this must never happen again," Mr Klap said.

"The moment that one race feels superior to another race you've got the Holocaust, you've got Darfur, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and ... maybe even in Fiji today."

The exhibition parallels events in the life of Anne Frank's family with the rise of the Nazi Party, the persecution of millions of Jews and other minorities and major events in World War II.

It includes an interactive panel at which visitors can send text messages to a virtual Anne and a short documentary featuring Holocaust survivors in New Zealand.

A LIFE CUT SHORT

Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who died of typhus at the age of 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just a month before the camp was liberated. Her family was trapped by the German occupation of the Netherlands and went into hiding for two years before being betrayed to the Nazis. After the war, her father, who survived internment in Auschwitz, published the diary Anne had kept during her years in hiding. It has since been translated into 65 languages. Miep Gies, the office secretary who defied Nazi occupiers in Amsterdam to hide Anne and her family for two years and saved the teenager's diary, died last month, aged 100.

- © Fairfax NZ News