With thanks to Year 12 student reporter, Daniela Koningham

Recently, five Year 12 history students, along with history teacher, Mr Johnston, attended a training session to learn how to become student guides for the Anne Frank, ‘Let Me Be Myself,’ exhibition coming to Auckland Museum next year. The students learnt how to engage with the exhibits and resources that will be on display, in readiness to answer questions from student visitors from all over Auckland. The exhibition has been organised by the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, using the research from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and will tell the story of Anne Frank’s life through interactive and informative sources.

We were lucky enough to be among the first students in the Southern Hemisphere to receive this training and we learnt about the many different aspects of the exhibition. We were guided through the basics of the ‘Let Me Be Myself’ programme as well as discussing what to do when faced with difficult questions, situations or students.

Throughout the day, we learnt more about the Frank family, the family that hid them, and what day to day life was like living in hiding. A heavily discussed topic was the legacy that Anne Frank left on the world and us personally. Anne’s diary, being one of the world’s most well-known and recognised pieces of writing, separates one person’s story from the vast statistics of the Holocaust, as well as highlighting the horrors that millions of Jews suffered during the Nazi regime in Europe.

The training we received will allow us to guide our fellow students safely into the historical context and safely out by making meaning through the personal connections of modern day discrimination and just how exactly one can avoid being not just a perpetrator, but a bystander as well.

Overall, the training we were given was an amazing experience. We got the opportunity to meet new students from other schools in Auckland and discuss what Anne Frank’s story meant to us. We are all very excited to become student guides for this incredible exhibit early next year and highly recommend visiting it when it is on display.

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