For many, Anne Frank’s name conjures imagery of a young Jewish girl with long dark hair and twinkling eyes, a secret hiding space, and of course, a diary.

On February 23, 1944, a 15-year-old girl gazed from an attic window at the topmost branches of a tree. In her diary, she wrote, “I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists…and I may live to see it, this sunshine, these cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy.” The girl was Anne Frank. She would die in a concentration camp less than a year after penning that entry. Decades later, the tree succumbed to old age; before it was removed, however, germinated chestnuts were collected, saplings sprouted, and Anne’s trees now grow all over Europe. Only a dozen so-called Anne Frank trees are rooted on U.S. soil, including at the Boston Commons and a 9/11 memorial park in New York City. The thirteenth will be planted on the University of Iowa Pentacrest on April 29, 2022. The tree was awarded to our campus and community in recognition of our literary heritage, for the UI’s excellence in tree stewardship, and in observation of the Pentacrest’s long history as a space of peaceful youth activism.

The University of Iowa Pentacrest Museums explores current exhibition Let Me Be Myself: The Life Story of Anne Frank through the Exhibition Spotlight program series in a special two-part virtual panel event.

This Provost's Global Forum brings together a multi-disciplinary panel of experts from Iowa and across Europe between February 28 - March 2, 2022, to highlight the educational value and continuing relevance of Anne Frank's story.

On this episode of Talk of Iowa, host Charity Nebbe explores the literature of the Holocaust, and the importance of reading books written about the Holocaust by those who witnessed the atrocities, with Elke Heckner.

“Emma’s research contributes to examining how fiction and mainstream media not only reflect public attitudes but influence them.” – Waltraud Maierhofer, Professor, German

Making use of large size pictures, the exhibition Let Me Be Myself - The Life Story of Anne Frank shows the story of Anne Frank from her birth in 1929 up to her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Each exhibition panel also contains images and texts about the world around Anne Frank: the rise of Hitler, the persecution of the Jews and the Second World War.