Record Number Visit Anne Frank House

Anne Frank House Image by AnneFrank.org

By JTA January 4, 2016

The Anne Frank House had a record number of visitors for the sixth consecutive year.

Some 1,268,095 people in 2015 visited the Anne Frank House, located at the site in Amsterdam where the young diarist hid from the Nazis with her family. That is 40,633 more than the previous record of 1,227,462 in 2014.

“We want to offer everyone the opportunity to visit the Anne Frank House. It is the place where the life story of Anne Frank is presented in the most authentic way. It’s impressive that so many people from all parts of the world visit this place and learn about this chapter of history,” Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House, said in a statement.

The Anne Frank house also organizes educational projects worldwide, exposing millions more people, most of them young, to the life story of the teenage diarist.: “The life story of Anne Frank encourages young people to reflect on the social developments of then and now, and inspires them to combat prejudice and discrimination in their own surroundings,” Leopold said.

On Friday, a French lawmaker and a French scholar each published the diary online in a challenge to another Anne Frank group, the Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss foundation that the teen’s father, Otto, established to allocate the book’s royalties to charity. European copyrights generally expire 70 years after an author’s death, thus the copyright was expected to expire at the end of 2015.

The teen’s diary, which chronicles two years of hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic, may be the most famous Holocaust-era document and has inspired several play and film adaptations. Anne died in 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen extermination camp.

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