AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — The Anne Frank House museum said Friday that it has restored 52 photographs and images the Jewish teenager pasted on the wall of her room to cheer herself up while hiding from the Nazis.
The water-stained collage of celebrities of the day, such as Greta Garbo and the Lane Sisters, that Anne Frank created after her family went into hiding have been seen by millions of visitors, offering them another view into the mind of the girl best known for her posthumously published diary.
“Our little room looked very bare at first with nothing on the walls,” Anne wrote in an entry on July 11, 1942. “But thanks to Daddy, who had brought my picture postcards and film-star collection . . . I have transformed the walls into one gigantic picture. This makes it look much more cheerful.”
One photo, of Olympic skater and Hollywood star Sonja Henie, had been out of place since an earlier museum renovation in the 1970s and has now been returned to its original spot, said museum spokeswoman Annemarie Bekker.
An investigation of the pictures found that most were movie stars cut from the Dutch women’s magazine Libelle, Bekker said.
As Anne grew older, she pasted over some of the glamor shots with reproductions of artwork by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
The pictures, well over 60 years old, have been undergoing restoration for a decade. They are now protected behind climate-controlled glass that Bekker said would guarantee their preservation for decades.
