Dutch attraction apologises for ‘condescending’ Anne Frank game

A Dutch tourist attraction has apologised following outrage about its “condescending” game Escape Bunker, where players have to escape from an apartment which closely resembles that of Anne Frank.

Visitors at the attraction in the town of Valkenswaard, south of Amsterdam, are locked in to a room and have to escape in one hour using teamwork, creativity and “out-of-the-box” thinking.

However the Anne Frank Foundation, which manages the Anne Frank museum and helps preserve the attic apartment where she hid in Amsterdam, said: “It shows very little empathy for survivors of the Shoah [Holocaust] to use the annex as a backdrop for an escape room.”

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A spokeswoman added that the game’s premise suggested “that if people in hiding were smart enough they would not be caught…That is not only historically and educationally inaccurate, it is also condescending”.

Thijs Verberne, a spokesman for the company, said they “did not mean to offend anybody”, and said they would change the wording associated with the game. 

The teenaged Jewish diarist, who was forced to hide from the Nazis along with six others, died aged 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, days before it was liberated by the Allies. Her diary survived, however, and is now read by schoolchildren around the world.