AP News, September 19th, 2007
A replica of the Amsterdam room where Jewish teenager Anne Frank wrote her diary will be housed in a British cathedral as part of a commemoration of the Holocaust.
The exhibit at Liverpool's Anglican cathedral will be part of the Anne Frank Festival and open a few weeks before the northwest port city hosts Britain's Holocaust Day commemorative service. The Jan. 27 service marks the anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation.
Organizer Jerry Goldman acknowledged Wednesday that he had reservations about placing the exhibition in a place of Christian worship, which could offend some Jews.
"But I don't think they will have issues with it being there because they will understand the value of it coming to Liverpool," he said.
Goldman, who is Jewish, told The Associated Press the cathedral was the largest potential venue for the exhibition and that its architecture lent it gravitas. He wants visitors to think twice about the Holocaust and to remember Frank, whose diary chronicled her life in hiding from the Nazis during World War II.
The warnings against violence conveyed in the festival will resonate in a region reeling from last month's fatal shooting of an 11-year-old boy, whose funeral was held in the same neo-gothic cathedral.
"In light of the terrible murder of Rhys Jones it is all the more important to demonstrate to young people the importance of joining together to reduce hatred and to build a society a society based on compassion, respect and responsibility," said Paul Tyack of The Anne Frank Trust UK.
Tyack said the British-built replica of the attic bedroom, which has crossed the country since it was first displayed in 2005, conveys the hardship of her family's two-year struggle hiding from the Nazis in the occupied Netherlands.
The 15-year-old Frank died of typhus in Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945 after being seized from the Amsterdam attic in August 1944 along with her parents and sister. Her father, Otto, who survived, published her work in 1947.
