Record number visit Anne Frank House

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JTA – The Anne Frank House had a record number of visitors for the sixth consecutive year.

In 2015, some 1,268,095 people visited the Anne Frank House, located at the site in Amsterdam where the young diarist hid from the Nazis with her family. That is 40,633 more than the previous record of 1,227,462 set the previous year.

“It’s impressive that so many people from all parts of the world visit this place and learn about this chapter of history,” Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House, said in a statement.

The Anne Frank house also organizes educational projects worldwide, exposing millions more people, most of them young, to the life story of the teenage diarist.

“The life story of Anne Frank encourages young people to reflect on the social developments of then and now, and inspires them to combat prejudice and discrimination in their own surroundings,” Leopold said.

On Friday, a French lawmaker and a French scholar each published the “Diary of Anne Frank” online in a challenge to the Swiss foundation established by the teen’s father, Otto, to allocate the book’s royalties to charity. European copyrights generally expire 70 years after an author’s death, thus the copyright was expected to expire at the end of 2015.

The diary, which chronicles two years of hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic, may be the most famous Holocaust-era document and has inspired several play and film adaptations. Anne died in 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen extermination camp.