An international exhibition depicting the story of the World War Two diarist Anne Frank and events surrounding the Holocaust will open at Auckland's War Memorial Museum on Friday.
The Diary of Anne Frank has long been a staple for Kiwi school children, learning about the horrors of the Nazi extermination of Jews during the war.
The book is still on the bestsellers list more than 70 years after Anne Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany in 1945, aged 15.
The Holocaust Centre of New Zealand is bringing her poignant story to life with the exhibition called Let Me Be Myself - The Life Story of Anne Frank.
“How can you kill a child one-and-a-half million times?
The Chairman of the exhibition is 92-year-old Boyd Klap. Now a proud Wellingtonian, Mr Klap was born in the Netherlands and lived through the horrors of World War Two.
He showed TVNZ1's Seven Sharp through the exhibition which includes a diagram showing the room Anne Frank was hiding in for two years and where she wrote her diary which is the basis of the exhibition.
"I knew the Anne Frank story very well. I'm not a Jew but I have many Jewish friends," Mr Klap told the programme.
"I was 13 years old at high school when the German Nazis invaded my country. I remember the day when it happened.
"But what I remember more than anything else is that after a couple of years the Jewish neighbours we had, they had their windows smashed, they had swastikas put on their doors, were arrested, taken to Germany and never came back," he said.
"I still can't believe that in that century civilised nations were involved in such horrific crimes. How can you hurt a child? How can you kill a child? How can you kill a child one-and-a-half million times?" he said.
In a section of the exhibition called "Learning from the Past" Mr Klap said: "This is probably the most important aspect of the exhibition. We must learn from the past to make certain it never happens again."
Auckland Museum is the first to host the exhibition in New Zealand, as part of a three-year tour supported by The Holocaust Centre of New Zealand.
The exhibition runs at the museum from February 9 to May 13.
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