Anne Frank in the World Exhibit

Anne Frank would have been 83 years old today. Her best read diary isn’t the only way her memory and legacy has been kept alive. The Anne Frank in the World exhibit in Sandy Springs is accomplishing that as well. And it makes for a comprehensive, meaningful field trip for day camps and home schoolers alike.

Presented by the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust, the exhibit tells Frank’s story in hundreds of photographs and a more than 8,000 words of text. There is also a 28 minute video “The Short Life of Anne Frank” that features the only known video footage of Frank. She apparently watches a wedding from a balcony.

In a social media world, where young people are using technology to continually broadcast their lives for better or worse - here is an example of rudimentary social media that in the end made a tremendous impact.

Anne's diary put a personal face to the horrors of the Holocaust. She is a figure that young people can latch onto. Like them she is precocious, inquisitive, concerned about her peers and family. As the commission states on its website:

“(By following Anne and her family) against the background of the events that culminated in World War II, the occupation of the Netherlands and the judgments of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, the exhibition enables children to experience in a more personal way, the horrors of the past and the hope for the future. It shows the terrible costs that unbridled prejudice, hatred and discrimination can impose upon a nation and its people. It also shows the wonderful, almost miraculous changes that even a small number of people can bring about when they embrace tolerance, promote diversity, and persist in seeing the goodness in humanity.”

Admission to the exhibit is free and open to the public. Here is information on how to get there.