Exhibition | accessibility.time_to
The diary of Anne Frank is world famous. It’s less well known that the journey to global publication began in Switzerland. While Anne, her sister and her mother were killed in the concentration camp, Anne’s father was the only family member to survive the Holocaust. Otto Frank moved to live with his sister in Basel in the 1950s. From there, he made it his task to share his daughter’s diary with the world whilst preserving her message on humanity and tolerance for the coming generations.
In collaboration with Anne Frank Fonds, Basel, and Familie Frank Zentrum im Jüdischen Museum Frankfurt
Guided tour of the exhibition «Anne Frank and Switzerland».
Tour: 1 hour
| Registration: |
2 weeks in advance |
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Duration: |
60 minutes; special packages can be offered on request |
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Group size: |
max. 25 persons per tour |
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Cost: |
CHF 120 for the tour, plus a reduced admission fee of CHF 10 per person. Free entrance for children up to 16 years. |
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| Opening hours: | Tuesdays - Sundays between 10.00 am – 17.00 pm |
Interactive guided tour of the exhibition «Anne Frank and Switzerland».
Interactive guided tour: 1,5 hours
Guided tours are free of charge for school classes from Switzerland.
Also available as a virtual tour, bookable as follows: every Monday, 08:15 - 16:30 and Tuesday to Friday, 08:15 - 10:30
For guided tours and indipendents visits for school groups, please contact us 14 days in advance.
Entrance and guided tours are free of charges for Swiss school classes.
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Anne Frank’s diary became a global phenomenon in the wake of the Holocaust. Chronicling 735 days of fear, hunger and the day-to-day routine for eight Jews in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, the diary is now famous throughout the world. However, few people are aware of the extent to which the Frank family and the dissemination of Anne’s diary are associated with Switzerland.
Edith, Margot and Anne Frank, and four other people with whom they’d been in hiding, didn’t make it back from the concentration camps. Only Otto Frank survived, returning from Auschwitz in 1945. As a stateless person he eventually settled in Switzerland, and it was from here that he launched his quest to take the legacy of his daughter Anne to the whole world. Her diaries are a plea for more humanity and tolerance, and they have become part of world literature.
The history of the Frank family is representative of the fate of countless Jewish families during World War II: exodus, flight, deportation, murder. Keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust became increasingly important in the mid-1990s. The exhibition interweaves the flight of Anne Frank’s family to Amsterdam with the lives of her relatives in exile in Basel. The parallel stories of the two branches of the family, and how their lives unfolded during World War II, makes the viewer much more keenly aware of the specific threats to Jews in two small European nations.
The exhibition’s central artefact is the diary of Anne Frank, which is presented in facsimile with displays and exhibits adding further detail to her accounts of life in hiding. It paints a picture of the conditions under which the texts were created, and examines the history of their impact and appeal. Using objects, photos and documents, the exhibition gives a glimpse into the family’s life. Thanks to a partnership with the Anne Frank Fonds Basel and the Familie Frank Zentrum Frankfurt, which holds the family archives, the exhibition presents an authentic narrative and opens up a vista of day-to-day life at a particular point of history, also covering refugee policy and refugee assistance in Switzerland during World War II.
More about the exhibition
