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Dutch Court to Rule on the Fate of Anne Frank’s Letters

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The Anne Frank House, a museum in Amsterdam that is dedicated to her memory.
The Anne Frank House, a museum in Amsterdam that is dedicated to her memory.
According to published reports, a Dutch court may soon rule on whether the letters written by Anne Frank, the young girl who became a symbol of the Holocaust, should remain in Amsterdam or be sent to Switzerland. Her internationally renowned diary about the time she and her family spent hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam was published posthumously and translated into many languages.

The focal point of the protracted dispute between the Anne Frank House; a museum based in Amsterdam that is dedicated to perpetuating her memory, and Anne Frank Fonds, the foundation established by Frank’s father Otto that is based in Basel, Switzerland are the letters written by Anne Frank along with 10,000 photographs and documents, but not the famous diary.

The issue of contention is where the appropriate venue should be for the archival material. In the larger picture, the debate rages on as to whether Anne Frank’s poignant narrative should be told in the Amsterdam museum that is dedicated to her memory or in the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt where the display of some of the documents would be part of a broader historical perspective.

“We have a small museum so we can’t display everything at once, but it’s important for us because it gives us a chance to add more information to the history that we tell,” said Teresien da Silva, head of collections at Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

Although the court in Amsterdam has already postponed the legal decision several times, a spokeswoman for the Dutch court said a judgment is now scheduled for Wednesday, June 26.

Originally from Germany, the Frank family moved to Amsterdam prior to World War II. Subsequent to the German invasion of the Netherlands, the Franks went into hiding in a clandestine annex behind the Prinsengracht canal house where Anne’s father had his office.

Along with her sister Margot, mother Edith, father Otto and four other Jews, Anne lived in the annex whose entrance was hidden behind a sliding bookcase for two years. They were looked after by Otto’s trusted employees but were eventually betrayed and sent to concentration camps. Only Otto survived.

Upon his return to Amsterdam after the war, Otto Frank was given Anne’s diary which he published; reaching millions of readers the world over.

Today, the Anne Frank House is one of Amsterdam’s top tourist attractions. The museum draws more than one million visitors a year and on any day of the week, hundreds of people can be seen lining up to see where Anne hid. The annual revenue of the museum is nearly 14 million euros ($18.39 million) which is earmarked towards the maintenance of the house, educational projects and traveling exhibitions.

The archives of the Anne Frank House contain letters, photos and documents from the Frank family and from the Frank-Elias family of Anne’s cousin, Buddy Elias, who is president of Anne Frank Fonds. The decision to lend the Frank-Elias archive to the Anne Frank Museum from the foundation in 2007 was a joint decision made so that the museum could make a complete inventory of all the documents related to Anne’s life, according to published reports.

Having made the decision that it wants its archive back, the foundation went to court in Amsterdam seeking the return of the Frank-Elias family archive, including some documents whose ownership is contested by the foundation and the museum.

Teresien da Silva of the Anne Frank House said that because of the history of how the letters and documents were collected from various family members, it is difficult to decide ownership of some of Anne’s letters. “Now the judges are researching who owns what,” she said.

Speaking to the Reuters news service, Yves Kugelmann, a spokesman for the foundation, said that the court will ultimately decide on the fate of the archives. “At the end of the day it’s also about how you deal with victims and remembering stories. We are not commercializing it. Anne Frank House is a commercial enterprise. It’s like a company.”

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