Museum
Visitors who wanted to see the secret rooms started coming to the house shortly after the book was published and many were informally shown around by the employees who had hidden the families. But by 1955 the company had moved to new premises and the entire block to which the building belonged was sold to a single estate agent who served a demolition order with the intention of building a factory on the space. A campaign to save the building and have it listed as a protected property was started by the Dutch paper Het Vrije Volk on 23 November 1955. The building was saved by campaigners who staged a protest outside the building on the day of demolition. The Anne Frank Foundation was set up by Otto Frank and Johannes Kleiman on 3 May 1957 with the primary aim of collecting enough funds to purchase and restore the building. In October of that year the company who owned it donated the building to the Foundation as a goodwill gesture. The collected funds were then used to purchase the house next door, Number 265, shortly before the remaining buildings on the block were pulled down as planned and the building was opened to the public in 1960.
From the outset the former hiding place of Anne Frank attracted a huge amount of interest, especially as translations and dramatisations of the Diary had made her a figure known throughout the world. Over 9,000 visitors came in its first year. In a decade there were twice as many. Over the years the building has had to be renovated to protect it from such large visitor numbers, and as a result it closed temporarily in 1970 and in 1999.
On 28 September 1999 Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands reopened the museum, which now incorporated the entire building between exhibition spaces, a bookshop, and a cafe, and featured the offices in the front house reconstructed to their state in the 1940s. In 2007, over one million people visited the museum.
On display at the museum is the Academy Award that Shelley Winters won, and later donated to the museum, for her performance as Petronella van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank. The award now sits in a bullet-proof glass case in the museum.
In 1998 the Anne Frank Zentrum in Berlin was opened, after the completion of a cooperation agreement with the Anne Frank House.
Read more about this topic: Anne Frank House
Famous quotes containing the word museum:
“Always clung to by barnacles.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 2661, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)
“It is the space inside that gives the drum its sound.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 1189, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)
“A fallen tree does not rise again.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 2412, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)