“Why did the Nazis want to kill Anne Frank?” a little girl asks her mother as the two study a panel describing living conditions in the young diarist’s Amsterdam hideout. The mother tries to explain the Holocaust in a way her daughter can understand, and the two contemplate the board a little longer before moving on.

Questions like these have come up a lot at Anne Frank: A Living History, an exhibit about Frank, her family, and the cultural and political causes and consequences of the Holocaust currently being presented by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. This multimedia presentation utilizes photographs, diary excerpts and accounts from survivors, a DVD presentation on Frank, and a virtual tour of the Franks’ Amsterdam hideout. More than a thousand schoolchildren from grades 4 to 12 have already come to OISE to learn about the life and experiences of a girl not much different than themselves.

The traveling exhibit, at U of T to coincide with the Toronto appearance of a photo exhibition from New York’s Anne Frank Centre, is the brainchild of OISE professor Lesley Shore, who, with the help of many of her coworkers, put together the show on a shoestring budget. Professor Shore said she had long been interested in Frank and her famous wartime diary.

“We can learn a lot about ourselves through writing,” Shore said. Although the challenges in Frank’s case were certainly extreme, Shore believes that all young people can relate to, and learn from, Frank’s experience. Her diary is useful, Shore said, because “you can enter this life so fully…she tells you so much about it.”

Shore said she has been “blown away by the response” from classes that have visited the show and continued the experience through letters and email exchanges with Shore. Sparking students’ interest in Frank and the broader issue of the Holocaust was one of the project’s main goals, Shore said.

“This experience is an incredible entry point for a subject usually characterized by absence and avoidance in the classroom,” Shore said. The main intention of the exhibit, and the diary itself, Shore said, is to empower students, to say to them, “Look at this child. Look at the mark she made on the world.” Racism, prejudice, and exclusion exist at every school, and exposure to these issues in Anne’s story can lead to more inclusive classrooms today.

For a girl of remarkable insight, Frank missed the mark when it came to measuring the future impact her diary would have.

“…It seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a 13-year-old schoolgirl,” Frank wrote in her diary. Fortunately for Professor Shore, to the many children and other visitors who have walked through the exhibit and the millions of readers around the world who have experienced Frank’s story, her musings have survived, and, as one student scrawled on her note, they “inspire us all to be a better person.”

Anne Frank: A History for Today can be viewed for free in the OISE library (252 Bloor St. W.) until Wednesday March 9.