AMSTERDAM | Tourists pose for pictures outside the Anne Frank House before they quietly file in to choose one of nine languages for an audio tour through an empty house filled with horror and hope.
Each year, more than a million people wind their way up the steps of a narrow, four-story building that during Germany’s occupation of the Netherlands doubled as Otto Frank’s herbs and spices business and a place to hide his family and friends from the Nazis.
Frank, his wife and their two daughters and another family, with the help of friends, found safety for slightly more than two years in the 1940s from German persecution of Jews.
Eventually, they were discovered and were either executed or died from diseases in concentration camps during the Holocaust, the genocide of an estimated 6 million European Jews during World War II. Of the eight people in hiding, only Otto Frank survived.
When liberation came at the end of the war, Frank received a diary that his teenage daughter, Anne, wrote while in hiding. He published the diary, widely known as the Diary of Anne Frank. Printed in 70 languages, the book resonated with young readers worldwide.
After Otto Frank rescued the house from demolition, it opened in 1960 as a museum along one of Amsterdam’s picturesque canals. Today, its walls are covered with video and text panels that tell the story of their ordeal along with excerpts from Anne’s writings.
On May 26, 1944, she wrote: “One day we’re laughing at the comical side of life in hiding, and the next day (and there are many such days) we’re frightened, and the fear, tension and despair can be read on our faces.”
The South Carolina connection
A story, however, that is not on display is the modern-day friendship between two scholars — one Dutch, the other a South Carolinian — that “set in motion” the possibility of a partner center for the Anne Frank House, which opened in August 2021 at the University of South Carolina (USC) in Columbia. The Anne Frank Center is the only partner site in the United States. Other locations are in Berlin and Buenos Aires.
In 2013, USC education professor Doyle Stevick visited the Buenos Aires partner site where he saw the potential of an Anne Frank affiliate to host an exhibition to teach about Anne Frank on the Columbia campus.
“It was always my dream, and I needed someone to give me a house,” he told the Charleston City Paper.
A decade before, he studied why central and eastern Europeans resisted efforts to teach the Holocaust, which led him to research attitudes toward the Holocaust globally. He co-edited a collection of essays, As the Witnesses Grow Silent. The work was done for the International Bureau of Education within the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
One of the essays came from Dutch historian Deinke Hondius, whose husband Jan Erik Dubbelman, unbeknownst to Stevick, was director of the international outreach program at the Anne Frank House. Dubbelman managed the Anne Frank House’s traveling exhibit program that sent educational material on the Anne Frank story to children in 89 countries.
A broken ankle knits a friendship
When Stevick was invited to lecture in northern Germany, he used the opportunity to meet Hondius in Amsterdam. Because she had broken her ankle while ice skating, she invited him to her home where she was healing. That set up Stevick’s serendipitous meeting with Dubbelman.
When the 6-foot-3-inch Stevick arrived, his presence and booming voice filled Hondius’ two-story flat in Amsterdam’s Jordaan District near the Anne Frank House. Ten minutes after Stevick and Hondius sat at her kitchen table, Dubbelman arrived to check on his wife. He joined the conversation with Stevick, and they’ve never stopped talking.
They connected immediately through a shared interest in the Holocaust, and they also bonded personally. Dubbelman was fascinated to meet an American scholar from the South, the center of the 1960s civil rights activities he watched as a boy on Dutch television.
“I was very upset about police dogs biting peaceful protestors,” he said. Television coverage of the Vietnam War also was difficult to view, coming from a country he loved. “I was pro-American,” he boasted. “My favorite books and music were American.
“If you ask any American where you should put the Anne Frank Center USA, nobody would say Columbia, S.C.,” Dubbelman said. “It is so surprising that it intrigues. Why there?”
Anne Frank’s diary was not popular in Europe, but the story came to life in America, Dubbelman said. Having an Anne Frank Center in Columbia is a “huge opportunity to connect the curses of antisemitism with anti-Black discrimination.”
Stevick said, “The American experience of race can give you a distorted interpretation of the Holocaust. [In America] race is a skin color concept, but for the Nazis they talked about blood. In the U.S., most of us grew up thinking of Jews as a religious group. The Nazis didn’t treat Jews as a religious group, but as a race. It leads us to misunderstand how the Holocaust unfolded.” Stevick is now the executive director of USC’s Anne Frank Center.
In schools that accept the Anne Frank traveling exhibit, teachers prepare students to talk about difficult issues of the past, Stevick said. The students, he said, “talk about the history and what it means to us today, and they lead conversations with their peers.”
A USC president gets involved
The day that USC’s president, Harris Pastides, announced the first of two retirements in October 2018, he said if it were up to him all of the university’s students would learn about Anne Frank and the Holocaust, Stevick recalled. He remembered replying that if there were a place on campus to set up a traveling exhibit, all the undergraduates could see it. Two days later at a private dinner, Pastides announced he had a house on campus that could be used for that purpose.
Pastides, who now lives in Charleston County, met Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House, during his visit to USC. That meeting accelerated the idea of an Anne Frank Center at USC, now housed in Barringer House on College Street.
Leopold said the Anne Frank House, the USC center and the centers in Argentina and Germany “all tell the story of a past that is very painful and of our shared humanity and [common] values. Otto Frank lost his entire family, and he was still capable of turning that tragedy into a mission for the young … to overcome everything that separates us because we have our shared humanity.”
In March 1959, Frank traveled by boat to New York City for the premiere of the Anne Frank movie, which he declined to watch because it was too painful, Dubbelman said.
Dubbelman speculated that while in the United States, Frank likely heard about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights struggle. This may explain his decision to give the museum a “broad mission to educate against all forms of discrimination,” he said. “In a way, USC is supporting Otto’s vision.”
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