A look inside the exhibit “Longing for Freedom. The World of Anne Frank” opening at the Jewish Museum Curaçao. Photo: Anne Frank House
A new exhibition about the life of teenage diarist and Holocaust victim Anne Frank will open on Sunday at the renovated Jewish Museum Curaçao.
School children on the Dutch Caribbean island will receive an educational program and free admission to the new exhibit titled, “Longing for Freedom. The World of Anne Frank.” The museum is located next to the Mikvé Israel-Emanuel Synagogue, which is the oldest synagogue still in use in the Western Hemisphere.
The exhibit will feature photographs and accompanying texts that provide details about Frank’s personal life — from her birth in 1929, to the rise of National Socialism, the start of World War II and her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945. The exhibition also discusses the publication of the diary she kept during the Holocaust while hiding with her family. Thirteen-year-old Frank, her parents, older sister, and four other Jews hid from the Nazis in a secret annex in Amsterdam from 1942 until they were discovered and arrested in 1944. Frank’s diary was posthumously published by her father, Otto Frank.
“Longing for Freedom. The World of Anne Frank” also features four videos in which young locals from Curaçao talk about their own personal experiences facing discrimination. Alongside the Frank exhibit, the Jewish Museum Curaçao features a display exploring the history of the Jewish community in Curaçao, dating back to the first Jews who arrived on the island in 1634, and the flourishing Jewish community that lives on the island today.
The museum additionally features an exhibition on George Maduro, a Curaçao native born in 1916 who moved to the Netherlands in 1926, and joined the resistance when Nazi Germany invaded 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 was then recaptured and deported to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died in February 1945 mere months before its liberation.
“In Curaçao, Jewish history lives on in the streets, the language, and the people,” said Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House. “George Maduro is part of this legacy. Anne Frank’s life story is now also part of the island, as can be seen in the beautifully renovated Jewish Museum Curaçao. Anne Frank and George Maduro: two young lives full of promise, cut short by hatred and war. Yet their voices remain. We hope that their stories and their voices will inspire young people to make the world a better and fairer place.”
The audio tour for “Longing for Freedom. The World of Anne Frank” and the videos included in the exhibit are available in English, Dutch, Papiamentu, and Spanish. The official languages in Curaçao are Dutch, Papiamentu, and English, but Papiamentu is used the most in the streets, on local television programs, and in parliament. Papiamentu is a Creole language that features elements of Portuguese, Spanish, African languages, Dutch, French, English, and Arawak languages.
