The purpose of this guide is to prepare teachers and students to view the exhibition, Anne Frank in the World, 1929-1945, while incorporating perspectives and themes highlighted in the Facing History and Ourselves program.
Through over five hundred photographs, the exhibition documents the lives of the Frank family during the Holocaust and provides an indepth profile of a totalitarian society in which racism and discrimination determined governmental policies in domestic and foreign affairs.
This guide is divided into six sections. The first two introductory sections—Society and the Individual and Who is Anne Frank?—examine the relationship between the individual and society, both in our own era and in the era of the Third Reich. Sections three through six consider the four principal themes (listed below) of the Anne Frank Center USA's exhibition:
- Due to her innocence, Anne Frank clearly cannot be blamed for her ultimate death. Therefore she has become a universal symbol for all those who experience the injustice of discrimination.
- Hitler did not seize power. He was legally brought to power by ordinary citizens who were promised ‘a Germany for Aryans only,’ making Jews the scapegoats for all problems.
- Ethnic, cultural and religious background does not determine someone’s stand in matters of human rights. It is a strictly personal choice.
- As long as we fail to look at all other people as individuals and continue to stereotype entire groups of people, racism, antisemitism and other discrimination will go on.
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