What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/1405208
38 WHAT'S UP! AUGUST 29-SEPTEMBER 4, 2021 FEATURE "In 1909, Nathan Straus Jr. convinced his father to invite Otto Frank to New York to work at Macy's," the story continues. "Otto's father encouraged this, believing it would be a good opportunity to practice English and learn about foreign commerce before Otto joined the family banking business in Frankfurt." Frank came to New York in September 1909 and returned to Germany in 1911, after his father's death. Straus and Frank remained friends, even vacationing with their families in Switzerland in 1928, and when Frank needed help to try to get his family out of Holland in 1941, he wrote to Nathan Straus Jr. The families lost contact in November 1941, and Frank's family went into hiding in July 1942. They were discovered and sent to a concentration camp in August 1944. Anne Frank and her sister Margot died in Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in 1945, and their mother died in Auschwitz. Otto Frank was freed when the war ended, and he reconnected with Nathan Straus in September 1945. Straus helped Frank get Anne's diary published in the United States in 1952, even asking Eleanor Roosevelt to write the forward. Perhaps Kellogg's favorite story, though, is about the Violins of Hope, a collection of Holocaust-related stringed instruments. According to the exhibition notes, Amnon Weinstein has spent the past two decades locating and restoring violins played by Jewish musicians during the Holocaust. Kellogg first heard of Violins of Hope at a concert by the Knoxville (Ky.) Symphony in 2019 and immediately set out to bring examples of the violins to the Titanic museums in both Branson and Pigeon Forge, Tenn. Weinstein loaned her two of his unfinished restorations, and one can be seen at each museum. For Kellogg, all roads lead to Titanic, including many more revealed in the current exhibition. And visitors are still invited to form their own connections when each receives a boarding pass with the name of an actual Titanic passenger or crew member, discovering their fate at the end of the $4.5 million collection of artifacts. "I want to share as closely as possible with guests what Titanic's actual passengers and crew experienced aboard ship," the museum founder John Joselyn has been quoted as saying. "Visitors can touch finely carved wooden inlays, grasp the wheel on the captain's bridge, tap out messages on the ship's wireless, feel an iceberg's chill, stroll decks and galleries and listen to stories told by real survivors. I think of it as 'living theater' with guests as part of the experience. "After 30 years, Titanic remains my magnificent obsession." Titanic Continued From Page 9 The replica of the Titanic's grand staircase is fully the size of the original and was built at a cost of more than $1 million. The collection of artifacts housed at the museum is valued at over $4.5 million. (Courtesy Photo) While the ship-shaped Titanic Museum Attraction in Branson seems huge, it is in fact built to half-scale of the actual ocean liner, which sank on April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic. The museum opened in 2006. (Courtesy Photo) Anne Frank is connected to the Titanic through a friendship between her father, Otto Frank, and Nathan Straus Jr., the nephew of Isidor and Ida Straus. (Courtesy Photo)