Anne Frank exhibition opens in the renovated Jewish Museum Curaçaoo

A look at the exhibition “Longing for freedom. The world of Anne Frank” in the Jewish Museum Curaçao. Photo: Anne Frank House

A new exhibition on the life of the teen divider and the Holocaust victim Anne Frank will open on Sunday in the renovated Jewish Museum Curaçao.

School children on the Dutch Caribbean island receive an educational program and a free entry into the new exhibition entitled “Longing for Freedom. The world of Anne Frank”. The museum is located next to the Mikvé Israel-Anrenuel Synagogue, the oldest synagogue that is still used in the western hemisphere.

The exhibition contains photos and accompanying texts that provide details of Frank’s personal life from their birth in 1929 to the rise of National Socialism, the beginning of the Second World War and their death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945. has. The thirteen -year -old Frank, her parents, her older sister and four other Jews hid from 1942 in a secret appendix in Amsterdam until they were discovered and arrested in 1944. Frank’s diary was published posthumously by her father Otto Frank.

“Longing for freedom. The world of Anne Frank” also contains four videos in which young locals from Curaçao talk about their personal experiences with discrimination. In addition to the Frank exhibition, the Jewish Museum Curaçao shows an exhibition in which the history of the Jewish community in Curaçao is researched and that arrived on the island in 1634, and the flowering Jewish community, which now lives on the island.

The museum also includes an exhibition on George Maduro, a Curaçao born in 1916, who moved to the Netherlands in 1926 and joined the resistance when Nazi -Germany entered the Netherlands in 1940. At the age of 23, Maduro led an attack on German troops in the Hague. He was captured, but escaped and then recaptured and deported to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died in February 1945 only months before his liberation.

“In Curaçao, Jewish history continues to live in the streets, in the language and in humans,” said Ronald Leopold, Managing Director of Anne Frank House. “George Maduro is part of this heritage. Anne Frank’s life story is now part of the island, as can be seen in the beautifully renovated Jewish Museum Curaçao. Anne Frank and George Maduro: Two young life full of promises, cut by hate and war.

The audio tour for “longing for freedom. The world of Anne Frank” and the videos contained in the exhibition are available in English, Dutch, Papiamentu and Spanish. The official languages ​​in Curaçao are Dutch, Papiamentu and English, but Papiumsu is used the most in the streets, in local television programs and in parliament. Papiumsu is a Creole language that contains elements of Portuguese, Spanish, African languages, Dutch, French, English and Arawak.