Anne Frank game of ‘escape’ blasted

The Anne Frank foundation has criticised an ‘escape room’ game made to look like the Amsterdam apartment where the Jewish diarist hid from the Netherlands’ Nazi occupiers during the Second World War.

According to its website, the recently opened Escape Bunker in Valkenswaard, 140km south of Amsterdam, has a room styled to look like the apartment.

As part of the game, visitors are locked in and have an hour to escape.

The Anne Frank Foundation, which manages the museum in the canal-side house that includes the Frank family’s apartment, said the apartment was one of the places where the Holocaust, or Shoah, played out.

“It shows very little empathy for survivors of the Shoah to use the annex as a backdrop for an escape room,” it said.

The bunker “creates the impression that hiding [from the Nazis] is an exciting game and if those hiding are smart enough they won’t be caught”, the foundation said, calling that impression historically wrong.

Thijs Verberne, operator of the bunker, defended it in a telephone interview, calling the escape room “an educational experience”.

Anne Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, shortly before it was liberated by Allied forces.