Gudeman’s NHD Exhibit Looks At Life Of Anne Frank, Qualifies For Nationals
Gudeman’s NHD Exhibit Looks At Life Of Anne Frank, Qualifies For Nationals
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
Gudeman’s NHD Exhibit Looks At Life Of Anne Frank, Qualifies For NationalsEditor’s Note: This is the second in a series of stories about Warsaw Community Schools students who advanced to National History Day national competition June 9-13 at the University of Maryland’s campus in College Park, Md.
In her first year of participating in National History Day, Edgewood Middle School eighth-grader Alli Gudeman is heading to nationals.
Her exhibit is on Anne Frank, the German-born Jew who became famous for her diary after she died in the Holocaust during World War II.
“It’s a three-panel board and I had it go through the events (of Frank’s life) from way before, right before, during, right after and way after,” Gudeman said. “I started off with Kristallnacht (the night in November 1938 when German synagogues were burned and windows of Jewish shops were smashed) with my way-before information. ... For my ‘right before’ I did the formation of ghettos, and that’s what pushed Anne Frank and her family to go into hiding.”
The main topic of Gudeman’s exhibit was of Frank’s time in hiding, followed by the concentration camps and the time the Frank family spent in them. She concluded with the liberation of concentration camps and what came after that.
NHD offers year-long academic programs that engage over half a million middle- and high-school students around the world annually in conducting original research on historical topics of interest, like Anne Frank. The largest NHD program is the NHD Contest that encourages more than half a million students to conduct historical research on a topic of their choice. Students enter these projects at the local and state levels, with top students advancing to the national contest at the University of Maryland.
The theme for this year’s competition is “Triumph and Tragedy in History.”
Gudeman said she put a lot of research into her project, right up to state competition in early April.
“I was doing research, trying to find sources that I could use that were good and supported everything and told everything I wanted to get across,” she said.
One thing she learned was that Frank and her sister died around the same time of the same illness.
“I thought that was really interesting, but also learning about her experiences as she went into hiding and what her personal thoughts were ’cause I read her diary and I was just able to learn more personally what went on with her. I also learned of the solitude that her and her family had to be in as they were in hiding. How careful they had to be to make sure they weren’t discovered,” Gudeman said.
She said Frank was an “inspiration” in just the way she dealt with everything. Frank “looked for the best things” in her scenario.
