Invest an hour at the time capsule that is “Anne Frank in the World” and prepare to spend the next day or two answering a litany of perplexing questions.

One, in particular, should stay with you. God help you if it doesn’t.

They’re among the final words you will digest on this international, walk-through exhibit that just opened at the Franco-American Heritage Center on 46 Cedar St. in Lewiston.

“Had Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl, lived next door,” reads the bold text, “could she have counted on us for help during the Nazi occupation? This is the question this exhibit forces us to ask again and again.”

It isn’t so much what Anne wrote in her famous diary that counts. It’s what we learn from the evil regime that ultimately took her life that counts.

This exhibit – sponsored by the Anne Frank Center and presented free through Tuesday, Nov. 30 – reinforces the importance of stifling discrimination.

All of it. At its source. Every day.

Seventy-eight lighted screens fan out across the sanctuary of the former church, telling the story of Adolf Hitler’s rise to absolute power in Germany and the abominable Holocaust that followed. Intertwined with that history lesson is the story of Frank, whose diary that records the Holocaust’s impact has been read by millions.

Resistance necessary’

Frank and her family were among 30,000 Jews living in Frankfurt at the outset of the Great Depression in 1929. The economic collapse left one-quarter of the city’s population without a steady income. Photos show hunched-over city residents combing a brick roadway for lumps of coal that had fallen from a truck.

Hitler successfully used the Jewish minority as a scapegoat for the malaise.

Those conditions and the increasing persecution of Jews in Germany led the Frank family to flee to Holland in 1933. They lived in relative safety until the Nazis invaded in 1940, then successfully hid in Amsterdam for two years before a raid on their annex.

The family was split up at that point, sent to several different concentration camps in Germany.

“Resistance against discrimination is necessary from the start,” the exhibit reads. “Had this conviction shaped the consciousness of voters in 1932, the name Adolf Hitler would be totally insignificant to us today.”

Instead, Hitler ignited the most abhorrent era in world history. The exhibit presents Hitler’s ethnic cleansing in scrapbook style, without apology, in grisly detail.

It’s a disturbing walk, and it should be.

You’ll see photographs of resistance fighters executed in the streets. The sight of a mentally retarded woman being photographed naked prior to her execution. Victims of an electricity, food and fuel cutoff in Amsterdam strewn across the altar of a church, without enough wood to supply their coffins. People cutting away at their doorposts in order to heat their homes.

What I long for’

Six million died in the Holocaust. They were Jews, political opponents of Hitler, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies and prisoners of war.

With the exception of Anne’s father, Otto, the entire Frank family was included in that toll. Before her family’s arrest and her death from typhoid fever in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, however, Anne wrote words that teach us all a lesson in faith and perseverance.

“Believe me, if you have been shut up for a year-and-a-half, it can get too much for you some days,” she wrote. “You can’t crush your feelings. Cycling, dancing, whistling, looking out into the world, feeling young – that’s what I long for.”

Not counting Thanksgiving, you have eight days to take this unforgettable journey. Time is even shorter to arrange possible school field trips.

Public exhibition is 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 1 to 4 p.m. on weekends. Groups should call 783-1585 to schedule a specific time.

Be prepared. Be informed. And, if necessary, be changed.

Kalle Oakes is the Sun Journal’s columnist. His e-mail is [email protected].