In 2021, the University of South Carolina became home to the Anne Frank Center, the only such center in North America and one of only four in the world. Here is the story of how the center came to be at Carolina and the larger story of its message of hope and understanding.
TRANSCRIPT
“The entire hiding place was only 45 square meters, 450 square feet. Eight people lived 25 months in 450 square feet…”
That’s Doyle Stevick, an associate professor in USC’s College of Education and executive director of the Anne Frank Center, where on a sunny day this fall he was leading a tour for visitors. You’ve probably heard of, perhaps have read The Diary of Anne Frank, the true account of a young Jewish girl hiding out with her family for two years in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during World War II. They were captured in 1944 and sent to concentration camps where all of them died except for Otto Frank, Anne’s father. He returned to Amsterdam, published her diary posthumously, and it became one of the world's best-known books, translated into more than 70 languages.
Evan Faulkenbury: In this episode of Remembering the Days, we’re going to tell the story of the Anne Frank Center here at the University of South Carolina. It’s one of only four partner sites of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, which gets about a million visitors every year who come to see and learn about the family’s story and the larger story of the Holocaust itself.
Today, we’re talking with several people about how the Anne Frank Center was established here at USC back in 2021. We’ll also talk about the center’s mission to address racial bigotry and hatred, which fueled the Holocaust in Anne Frank’s day and continue to cause strife around the world.
Chris Horn: The story of the Anne Frank Center is, ultimately, a story of people and a shared vision. More than a decade ago, Doyle Stevick was doing research related to the Holocaust in Europe.
Doyle Stevick: I was working in Central and Eastern Europe for my research and was really struck by the difficulty that region had dealing with the Holocaust, which primarily occurred in Central and Eastern Europe. And through that process, I got connected with UNESCO and we did a book on Holocaust education around the world. When that happened, the Anne Frank House had a historian contribute a chapter, so we got personally connected on that level. That's when I began to learn about the Anne Frank House’s work, and I was stunned that the Anne Frank House had programs in 89 countries that were active all over the globe. And I, of course, knew the famous hiding place where Anne was. But I didn't realize that her father had arranged for the Anne Frank House to be a living educational institution, carrying Anne’s story and her spirit around the world.
Chris Horn: Doyle was a visiting scholar at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam in 2012. When he returned to the University of South Carolina in 2013, he partnered with the Anne Frank House to organize a traveling exhibit where middle and high school students in South Carolina could learn more about Anne Frank and the larger story of the Holocaust.
Doyle Stevick: The Anne Frank House realized decades ago that people have very powerful experiences in Amsterdam, but they knew most people can't go. So their solution was to develop a traveling exhibit program that traveled all over the globe. It was behind the Iron Curtain in Poland, which was the epicenter of the Holocaust, still during Communist times. So it was a remarkable program. But what the Anne Frank House understood better than most is the power of young people's voices. I mean, it was a teenager, who wrote this diary that became one of the most-read books in the history of the world, translated in more than 70 languages. And they took that insight about the power of young people's voices, together with the traveling exhibit, so when the exhibit would go into a new country, new community, they'd gather up 20 young people, a cross-section of kids in the school and prepare them to be the guides for the exhibit. So they're not little mini historians trying to transmit information — they’re peers who were moved by a story and want to share that story with their fellow students. And think about what it means for us today. What kind of people we want to be. What kind of communities we want to build so that we can create the kind of world where every Anne Frank can live to her full potential.
Evan Faulkenbury: Sam Livoti was an eighth-grader in 2013 when the Anne Frank traveling exhibit came to Dent Middle School in Columbia. It would prove to be a life-changing experience for Sam, who is now an education specialist at the Anne Frank Center at USC.
Sam Livoti: So the spring of my eighth-grade year, I was pulled out of class by my lead teacher at the time because he thought I might be interested in being a docent for a traveling exhibit from the Anne Frank House, and so I didn't have too much information about what that meant, what it looked like, and so I stayed after school for two days, and we did a training with actually, the Anne Frank House staff was there, and it completely changed my life. Not to be cheesy, but it was one of the first times I remember as a young person realizing that my voice really mattered, and we had such deep discussion, young people and adults, on heavy topics — antisemitism, racism, all of these things that are complicated. And the Anne Frank House staff validated our thoughts. We were eighth-graders trying to conceptualize these different things. And they said, yeah, you're right. And as a young person, that just makes you feel heard, seen. You become a leader for your peers.
Evan Faulkenbury: At the time, Morgan Bailey was a USC student assisting Doyle Stevick with the Anne Frank traveling exhibit. She saw first-hand the transformative effect of the exhibit’s message.
Morgan Bailey: I remember that training at Dent Middle School with Sam and the Anne Frank House staff coming. And so as an undergraduate student who really wasn't sure of what life trajectory I was on, I was watching this kind of magic happen in the room and going, ‘I don't know what this is, but I want to be a part of this. This is really something special.’ I'm from Walterboro, a small town in South Carolina. And so, Doyle said, ‘Hey, do you think that we could take this to your hometown?’ And so we did that. And you know, what's really beautiful about all of this work is how student-centered it is. I remember at like 19, Doyle was like, ‘Hey, you should email the superintendent and tell her about this.’ And to him, that was nothing. But to me, it took me three weeks to write that email because I was so stressed. I had never emailed someone so important as a superintendent of a school district. But how cool for me at 19 to have the opportunity to make something like that happen in my hometown.
Evan Faulkenbury: Morgan studied in Italy during the spring semester of her junior year and was an intern at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam that summer, which turned out to be quite the opportunity.
Morgan Bailey: I had never left the country before. So absolutely a life-changing experience to leave for the first time, be gone for eight months. My parents had never left the country. They got to come visit. So really kind of life-changing. And, you know, for my whole family in a lot of ways, so really cool stuff. And then came back, ended up becoming a classroom teacher for a few years. And then not too long after, was able to come in and kind of a part-time capacity supporting the work. Doyle was still volunteering his time at that point. And so I like to say it was just Doyle volunteering his time. I was part time. I had my 1999 Chevy Blazer, and I would load up the traveling exhibit in the back of it and drive around to schools around the state.
Chris Horn: The Anne Frank traveling exhibit made its way to schools across South Carolina and even to other states. The commitment of everyone involved on the USC team impressed the leadership at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and conversations about establishing a permanent exhibit site at USC began to take place.
Harris Pastides, USC’s 28th president, had previously collaborated with Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House, and the former president and his wife, Patricia, had taken their children to visit the house when they were quite young.
By 2021, with Dr. Pastides playing a key role, an agreement was signed, designating the University of South Carolina as a partner site of the Anne Frank House, only the fourth such site in the world and the only one in North America.
Evan Faulkenbury: The Anne Frank Center at USC is housed in the Barringer House on the east side of campus, near Capstone and Columbia Hall. Volunteer docents guide visitors through the house, which includes a replica of the bookcase that served as a secret passageway to the room in which Anne Frank and seven others hid from the Nazis.
The center also has a replica of the room where they hid, furnished with antique props that were used several years ago in a movie about Anne Frank.
Sam Livoti describes what a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is like and what to expect on a visit to the Anne Frank Center at USC.
Sam Livoti: When you visit the Anne Frank House, it's unfurnished. And that was the wish of Otto Frank, because it's a reflection of how he feels losing his whole family. And so here in Columbia, you get to see just in one room, the walls are the wallpaper is, you know, a different room of the annex furnished. It's a staged image, is what we're looking at with some props in between. And so, you see, we have the lighting that they lived with. Our windows are blacked out, just elements of what they experienced in hiding. And so students and visitors can understand what that might have been like for them. And visiting the Anne Frank House, I think when you're in the physical space where they actually hid, that's profound in itself, but to see it staged in a furnished version is extremely different because you can imagine, OK, eight people in, you know, 450-square-foot space furnished. That is not a lot of room. You have to stay clean. All of this.
And so we like to talk about some of those kind of anecdotes of life in hiding in the annex room. And then after that, we talk about the arrest of the eight people in hiding, and then what happens to all of them after the arrest. And so it ends the tour with talking about Otto Frank's journey home and how he wanted to continue the legacy of Anne Frank and make Anne's wishes come true. He publishes the diary. He opens an educational foundation, which allows us to do the work that we're doing now here. And so, I've actually heard from a lot of visitors that the tour here is a lot more intimate than a tour they might get in Amsterdam, and I think that's because all of our tours are guided. So you can't just walk in. You set an appointment and it's a guide trained by our staff here. That gives a full 75-minute version. And that's not the experience at the house since they have so many more visitors coming through.
Evan Faulkenbury: In addition to being an education specialist at the center, Sam is also the U.S. coordinator for the Anne Frank Youth Network, an international community of young people ages 16 to 26 who are committed to fostering democracy, human rights and tolerance.
Chris Horn: We asked the Anne Frank Center staff one final question, and we’ll end the episode with their responses. Our question was simple: What is it about Anne Frank’s story that makes it so powerful and so enduring? Here’s what Morgan, Sam and Doyle had to say.
Morgan Bailey: My first response to this is always to point out that Anne is no more special than any other victim or survivor, right? So we don't intend to say that she's any better or deserves any more attention. And we hope that learning about Anne is simply a starting point and that people will start learning about Anne, but then continue learning about more people and more stories. But Anne was also special and unique in ways that every other person is special and unique. And she was genuinely a very gifted writer. And if anyone has picked up her book, especially as an adult, I know a lot of people have read it in school, but it's worth picking up as an adult and really appreciating what an incredible writer she was. I think that one thing that makes her, people connect with her, especially is her wit and her humor and her, how real and honest she was, even at times, if it wasn't nice and neat and pretty, she was just herself. And just very practically, we have a lot of photos of her. Her father was an amateur photographer. And so people are able to see her face and feel a sense of connection to her that maybe they can't for the authors of other diaries of people in writing. And so part of our messaging is the same way that you may feel that connection to Anne and you recognize, 'Wow, she was a real person who was alive. And so my heart breaks for her. Let's try to share that same energy for every other name, the ones we know and the ones that that we don't.'
Sam Livoti: They were in the same hiding place for 25 months. So it's their chunk of hiding was pretty much all there in the diary. And what I loved about her diary as a, you know, an eighth-grader, what I love about it now as an adult is kind of this rawness that Morgan's talking about, and she is talking about puberty, boys, things that we all go through, too. And as a young girl myself reading that, I'm like, 'Wow, she's just like me.' And this is in the ’40s. And so some things just don't change. It's a universal experience. And she's a child, and she's experiencing childhood and young adulthood in the pages of this diary. And so it is very real to read that. And, you know, she's also going through this extreme tragedy. She's living through war and she's facing persecution as a Jewish person. And so watching a child weigh those things — is a bomb going to fall on their building and kill them in their sleep? Is she going to be murdered in a concentration camp? Watching her grapple with that in the diary is, I think for a young person and an adult, very moving. And again, you're connecting with her because you feel this closeness. She's being vulnerable on those pages. And so you, I think for me, you can trust her and what she's saying and what she's going through.
Doyle Stevick: Anne Frank was born in a country that didn't think she deserved to live. And she fled to the Netherlands with her family, which was then invaded by that same country. And she was once again under the authority now of a government that was trying to find her and kill her. Imagine being a child, trying to make sense of a world where your government's trying to find and kill you. I find it so extraordinary that despite all of that, she maintained a desire to go out and work for humankind. She had a fierce determination not to cave in to despair in the face of the most intimidating military force that had ever existed. And it's an extraordinary thing. She was an ordinary girl, and at the same time, produced an extraordinary work. And that fact that she almost made it, she tragically was murdered by the Nazis, reminds us just how precious every single lost human life is and just how much human potential was destroyed in that awful event that was the Holocaust. With Anne, she's desperate for human connection as so many of us as human beings are. And she gives us such an intimate portrait that very few people in your life to get to know as well as Anne lets us get to know her. And I think that that access, that commitment, that intimacy of the diary makes it, just one of the one of the unique documents of the human experience and it continues to inspire around the world to this day.”
Evan Faulkenbury: You can learn more about the Anne Frank Center, book a group tour and even get information about hosting an exhibit from the center in the town where you live. Just go to annefrankcenter.com. That’s Anne with an ‘e’ frank center dot com.
Chris Horn: On the next episode of Remembering the Days, we’re going back to the late 1960s, when an energetic assistant professor of chemistry arrived at USC. He would go on to become a department chair, college dean, provost of the university and, ultimately, executive director of University Foundations during his 43-year career.
It’s the story of Jerry Odom, next on Remembering the Days.