With the help of artificial intelligence and a smartphone, a new immersive experience follows Anne Frank’s steps in 1940s Amsterdam, an interactive reconstruction of the life of the Dutch Jewish girl under Nazi occupation.
In 1941, the young Anne and her sister Margot had to walk 2.5 kilometers every day to go to school because anti-Semitic laws prohibited them from using public transportation or a bicycle. An experience that can now be relived virtually.
“We created this product to bring Anne Frank closer to a larger number of people,” explains Moti Erdeapel, director of CityFans, the company responsible for the project, which combines tourism and technology.
“The Anne Frank House museum is very small and its capacity is limited. Many people come here and are disappointed because they cannot find Anne Frank,” he highlights.
More than a million tourists visit each year the small house and the annex, where the young Jewish girl and her family hid from the Nazis for two years.
To visit the place where the young woman wrote her famous diary, visitors must book at least one and a half months in advance.
But with the virtual visit, all you need is a cell phone, headphones, and a code that gives access to a 7-kilometer tour in 12 stages.
An audio narration accompanies the visitor, as well as animations generated by artificial intelligence from data of the Anne Frank Institute, the city of Amsterdam, and the Holocaust Museum.
“we are trying to uncover stories that most people don’t know, but which are incredible, of people who really risked their lives to save children from the nazis,” explains Erdeapel.
One of the steps of the visit is Miep Gies’ house, a Catholic Dutch woman who helped the Frank family hide. The features of her face come to life from archive photos.
In the modern neighborhood of De Pijp, the tour reveals the place where the popular ice cream parlor Koco was, now a café.
This ice cream parlor was owned by German Jewish refugees, who were driving a resistance movement that caused the only demonstration against the treatment of Jews in Amsterdam, which was violently suppressed.
“This story touches my heart because it is important not only for Amsterdam, but also for me personally,” says Erdeapel, of Polish and Hungarian Jewish origin.
“my grandparents survived the Holocaust, as did various members of my family, and I grew up hearing stories about the Holocaust and about the people who did not survive,” adds this 45-year-old resident of Amsterdam.
Although he recognizes the importance of museums, Erdeapel sees this guided tour as an opportunity to tell the story of Anne Frank to a new generation accustomed to technology.
“It is very important that we do good research, that we work on the narrative, and that there is a human aspect in the creation,” he insists.
About 107,000 Dutch Jews and refugees were deported during World War II.
Desses, 102,000, including Anne Frank, were murdered, that is, about 75% of the Jewish population before the war.
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