For the 50th year anniversary, the Anne Frank Museum has come up with an amazing interactive virtual tour of the house that had been hosting the two families hiding from the Nazi regime during the war. The interactive tool that reveals the hidden place where Anne wrote her famous journal is making it way easier for tourists and fans of the book to discover some of the most interesting facts regarding their life there.
Reviving one of the most impressive stories of Jewish oppression that is rapidly fading from the world’s collective memory, the tour of the hidden annex reveals some of the most intimate details of their life as survivors of WWII and the Holocaust.
For this delicate job, the museum enlisted the services of Dutch interactive agency LBi Lost Boys. They carefully developed the site, and, with the support of the BankGiro Lottery, and the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport in the Netherlands they managed to create an interactive experience that leaves you breathless.
The story from Anne Frank’s journal – in an interactive virtual tour
Web users can see the hidden annex where the teenage girl and her family lived for two years before they were arrested by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps in 1944. After the inhabitants were arrested, the secret annex was cleared. Once the war was over, Otto Frank wished for it to remain empty.
Apart from the secret rooms where Anne Frank hid from Hitler’s secret police, the online tour presents details and objects that would otherwise be inaccessible to the common visitor of the museum, as the common exhibition does not contain furniture or objects of daily use from the war years. By contrast, the online version contains objects that visitors can see and find out more about. The furnished rooms have been created based on photographs made in 1999, when the front part of the house and the secret annex were temporarily furnished as part of the creation of educational materials showing how they were used. This gives the online visitors a better idea of what life was like at 263 Prinsengracht in Amstersdam in 1942.
Anne died at the age of 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 after an informer told the Nazis about the annex. But her father survived the Holocaust and published his daughter’s diaries where she described in poignant detail what life was like hiding from the German secret police during the Nazi occupation. They include details of how she coped being confined to the cramped space with seven other Jews.
