Jan. 27, 2023
—
Today on International Holocaust Remembrance Day the Anne Frank House launches the Anne Frank Knowledge Base. This online knowledge base in Dutch and English offers professionals and others a wealth of information about the history of Anne Frank and the seven other people who lived in hiding in the Secret Annex, all set in the context of the Second World War and the persecution of the Jews.
Information previously only available for internal use is now made accessible to interested parties worldwide, thanks to financial support from the Mondriaan Fund. The knowledge base can be accessed directly or through Anne’s World, an online world map with events and stories.
Otto Frank
Otto Frank’s return from Auschwitz to Amsterdam is one of the stories that can be tracked in Anne’s World. On 27 January 1945, 78 years ago today, Red Army units liberated the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. Otto Frank, Anne’s father, was one of around 8,000 prisoners who had been left behind, most of them critically ill. After regaining some of his strength, Otto left for the Netherlands on 5 March 1945: a three-month journey that took him to Katowice, Chernivtsi, Odesa, and Marseilles. In Anne’s World, you can track his journey and click through to the Anne Frank Knowledge Base to learn more about the places Otto Frank visited on his return trip and the people he met during those months. One of them was Rosa de Winter-Levy, who told him that his wife Edith had died of malnutrition and exhaustion in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Anne’s World & Anne Frank Knowledge Base
The Anne Frank Knowledge Base can be accessed directly or through Anne’s World (a new section on the website). Any information about events, persons, locations, or topics can be retrieved by simply typing the relevant keywords in the knowledge base. One can also wander from one entry to the next. The knowledge base is accessible in Dutch and in English and contains about 1,100 items, 300,000 words, and 300 pictures. The Anne Frank Knowledge Base will never be ‘finished’: new information is always added to the knowledge base, and the inclusion of items from the collection and videos is on the agenda.
The knowledge base provides a kaleidoscopic picture of the main characters of Prinsengracht 263, their lives and their world, based on extensive and long-term historical-scientific research. The knowledge base is linked to the War Resources Network (Linked Open Data), which automatically connects data from our knowledge base to other data.
Mondriaan Fund
Anne’s World and the Anne Frank Knowledge Base have been made possible by the Mondriaan Fund. Maykin Media and DOOR have developed and designed Anne’s World.
‘We are most grateful to the Mondriaan Fund for its support. Thanks to the financial contribution from the Mondriaan Fund, we can now share our knowledge about Anne Frank’s history with audiences worldwide. This had been on our wishlist for some time. The interconnections within the knowledge base are extraordinary. You can move from one item to the next and learn as you go. My advice would be to check it out!’
