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An exhibition on Holocaust victim Anne Frank will open at Te Papa in February 2010 at the start of a two-year New Zealand tour. See the event website here.

Anne Frank: A Historry For Today will run from 10 February until 24 March at Te Papa, and will be officially opened by NZ Prime Minister John Key. Entry is free.

The exhibition includes material from Amsterdam's Anne Frank Museum. It gives the history of World War II and the Holocaust through Anne Frank's life story, and the diary the teenager kept for two years while hiding from the Nazis before being betrayed and sent to concentration camps and death in Germany.

It charts the history of her family in the context of events starting with the end of World War I, the rise of Nazism and World War II.

"Internationally, she is considered as the child icon of the 20th century," organising committee chairman Boyd Klap said. "There is no-one who can be compared to Anne Frank - not only her courage but the way she writes."

Her story underlined the dangers of racism and how it could undermine human rights and democracy.

"It tells you what can happen when a race feels superior like what is happening in Darfur, what happened with the Khmer Rouge and what might still be happening in Fiji today.

"The purpose of us getting it here is that there are new generations growing up who do not know what happened."

The exhibition, which has toured 150 countries, will be adapted for New Zealand and include interviews with New Zealand Holocaust survivors.

A Life Cut Short

Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who died of typhus at the age of 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just months before the end of World War II.

Trapped by the German occupation of the Netherlands, her family went into hiding for two years before being betrayed to the Nazis.

After the war, her father, who survived internment in Auschwitz, published the diary Anne had kept during her years in hiding. It has since been translated into 65 languages.

If she had survived she would have had her 80th birthday this year.

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