Over a million people from around the world travel to Amsterdam each year to see the house where Anne Frank wrote her diary, now the Anne Frank House museum. Yet many never have the chance. Now, a rare opportunity to experience the house’s Secret Annex is coming to Chicago. The Griffin Museum of S cience and Industry is hosting “Anne Frank The Exhibition,” opening May 1, giving visitors the chance to step into a full-scale, fully furnished recreation of the Secret Annex in Amsterdam, where Frank, her family, and four other Jewish refugees hid from the Nazis during World War II. “We’re very excited about bringing the Anne Frank exhibition to Chicago,” said Chevy Humphrey, president and CEO of the Griffin MSI. “When we look for traveling exhibits, we look for things that can inspire our community but can also connect us.” After premiering in New York City on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the exhibit is coming to Chicago, featuring more than 130 original artifacts from the Annex. “We need to give visitors the impression that once they step into this hiding place, they should have the feeling that those eight people just left,” said Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. “Through these personal items, it brings you closer to the perspective of how they have experienced the time in hiding.” Among the artifacts are Anne Frank’s first photo album, handwritten verses by Anne and her sister Margot in friends’ poetry albums, and a German fairytale book belonging to the two. Chicago visitors will also see items never before displayed publicly, including a letter Anne’s father, Otto Frank, wrote in 1945, after being liberated from Auschwitz. In it, Otto writes to his second cousin in the United Kingdom: “I’m free, and I have no idea what happened to my family.” “You’re so close to moments in their lives that have been so full of emotion, loss, grief, uncertainty by that time, not knowing what happened,” Leopold said. The exhibit will be displayed in a 20,000-square-foot traveling exhibition gallery on the south side of the museum. Visitors will begin by tracing Anne’s life from her birth in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929 to the family’s move to Amsterdam in the early 1930s, following the rise of Adolf Hitler. In July 1942, the Frank family went into hiding in a concealed annex at the back of Otto Frank’s company, where they were soon joined by the Van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer. “In the original house, the space is defined by emptiness and what was left behind by Anne, her family,” Leopold said. “It’s very much about absence.” Outside the Annex, the exhibit immerses visitors in the broader context of Anne’s life, including the aftermath of the war, when her father worked to preserve her legacy. Visitors follow Otto Frank’s five-month journey back to Amsterdam after liberation, returning to a city that had lost around 70,000 Jewish residents and to his family’s hiding place, mostly emptied by the Nazis. He published his daughter’s diary in 1947. It was released in the United States in 1952, titled “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” and later adapted into a 1959 film and a 1995 Broadway play, helping cement Anne’s global legacy. Visitors look at a recreated room as part of "Anne Frank The Exhibition" in an earlier run at the Center for Jewish History in New York on Jan. 27, 2025. The exhibit, coming to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, was created by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and includes a replica of the secret annex where Anne Frank hid with her family. (Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty) A replica of a room in the Secret Annex as part of "Anne Frank The Exhibition" in an earlier run at the Center for Jewish History in New York. (Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty) “Anne changed the world,” Leopold said. “And the fact that she changed the world is also very much to his credit, to the credit of a father who knew how important that those words  … those words that we need in order to better understand the challenges of our own times and of our own world.” The United States played a critical role in preserving Anne’s story. According to the Anne Frank House, 25% of visitors in Amsterdam are from the United States, and American support helped save the building from demolition in the 1950s. Leopold said the full exhibit’s debut in Chicago at the Griffin MSI is also especially significant. “When you look at the founder of this museum, Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish man who felt moral responsibility not just to share the knowledge with everyone. … He felt strongly about the racial persecution and segregation in the South and that is exactly what you see with Otto Frank in the 1950s,” Leopold said. “So the vision and the spirit of these two men come together in Chicago.” Griffin MSI will offer free admission to all organized school field trips and each student will receive a diary to take home. “Think about a child today,” Humphrey said. “How are we helping them to make sense of this world and what’s happening around them?” The exhibition is designed for children ages 10 and older, as well as adults. Teachers will have access to age-appropriate resources, including an antisemitism curriculum developed by the Anne Frank House and the Anne Frank Center at the University of South Carolina. “Kids have the right to shape their own worlds,” Leopold said. “I really hope that all these kids that come to the exhibition and read the diary, that they will have a better world.” The exhibit, which previously was displayed at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, will remain open in Chicago through early 2027. While there are no immediate plans for additional locations, Leopold hopes it will eventually travel across the U.S. “It has become powerfully evident that people feel a deep and urgent need to connect to Anne,” he said. “By connecting to her story, they will carry forward her words. And that is exactly what her dream was.” If you go “Anne Frank The Exhibition” will open May 1 at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry Chicago, 57th St. and DuSable Lake Shore Drive; tickets $15-$19 (not including general admission) at 773-684-1414 and msichicago.org ...read more read less