Coimbatore school hosts a photo exhibition on Anne Frank

Experience Anne Frank's story through a student-curated photo exhibition at Yellow Train School, Muthalipalayam, open to the public.

Children from class IX of Yellow Train School bustle about a well-lit room on the second floor of a new building in the campus at Muthalipalayam. They are setting up the photo exhibition Anne Frank: A History For Today, curated by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and coordinated by the History For Peace initiative by the Kolkata-based Seagull Foundation for the Arts. Anne was 13 years old when she first started writing in her diary. A group of students of the exact same age from Yellow Train revisit her years in hiding through photos that speak of the most violent military conflict in human history: the Second World War.

Animated conversations fill the air as 32 panels featuring photos and descriptive notes are arranged: the children attended a two-day workshop by the Seagull Foundation for the Arts to become peer guides. They will be walking visitors through the exhibition that will also feature a documentary film screening on Anne.

‘Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me…’ it is these words that lead us into the exhibition that starts with a photo of Anne in shoulder-length hair and haunting eyes. What follows are photos of her parents Otto Frank and Edith Frank-Hollander on their wedding day, and panels leading into the crisis in Germany after the First World War, the first signs of brutality by the Nazis and the worried parents of two little girls: Anne and Margot, who wonder if they should move to another country to start a new life.

“Her life makes me realise how privileged I am,” says 14-year-old R Ryna, walking us through the panels. Most children speak of being able to connect with the teenager with big dreams and unwieldy emotions who chose to write her way through the most difficult years of her life. “She had to spend two precious years of her life in hiding, cut off from the world. To think that she went through that at that tender age…” she adds.

There are photos of a doe-eyed Anne as a four-year-old; of her posing with her doll as a little girl; at school in Holland; playing in a sandbox on a carefree day in 1937… juxtaposed with images that talk about how the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) gains power, and the rise of Adolf Hitler. The panels detail the prosecution of Jews, the German invasion of Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

The Franks go into hiding in a building where Otto worked, in rooms behind a hinged bookcase. There are photos of the ‘secret annexe’ where Anne goes through a range of emotions — from falling in love, to discovering her flair for writing. Anne’s words in her diary intersperse the display. ‘I hope I will be able to confide everything to you…’ reads her first entry on her 13th birthday. Anne pasted passport-size photos of herself in the pages, and a panel shows how she sometimes wrote in block letters, and at some others, in cursive.

‘Will I ever become a journalist or a writer?’ goes an entry, and the panel shows Anne’s room where she studied and wrote, her table with her diary with a red checked cover, the attic where she spent time alone.