Group Rapped for Turning Anne Frank Story Into ‘Escape Room’ Game

An escape room in Valkenswaard, the Netherlands, made to look like Anne Frank’s hiding room. Image by Youtube Screenshot

By Josefin Dolsten March 22, 2016

The Anne Frank foundation criticized an “escape room” game which included an area designed to look like the Amsterdam World War II hiding space of the famous young Jewish writer, after which it is named.

“It shows very little empathy for survivors of the Shoah to use the annex as a backdrop for an escape room,” the Anne Frank foundation said on Friday, according to AP, using a Hebrew word for the Holocaust.

The escape room made light of the plight of the Frank family, turning their hiding “into an exciting game” and implying that not getting caught by the Nazis was based on intelligence, which directly conflicted with historical reality, the foundation added.

Thijs Verberne, the organizer of the escape room, which is located in the south of the Netherlands, in the town of Valkenswaard, defended the set-up.

The game was intended to be “an educational experience,” the organizer said, but some of the wording surrounding it would be changed, according to .

Escape rooms are part of a game in which and participants have to use various clues in order to escape a locked room, or series of rooms in a set time limit.

Anne Frank became one of the most famous Holocaust victims after the publication of a diary she wrote while hiding from the Nazis with her family. She died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15, shortly before British soldiers liberated the camp.

Josefin Dolsten is a New York-based writer who has reported for the Forward, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, The Times of Israel and other Jewish publications. She currently works as an account director at Fenton Communications, supporting organizations that work to advance racial justice, LGBTQ+ equality, reproductive rights and more. Dolsten earned her B.A. in government from Cornell University and her M.A. in comparative religion and Jewish studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $325,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO