Museum criticizes Anne Frank-themed ?escape room?

AMSTERDAM (AP) ? The Anne Frank foundation today criticized an ?escape room? game made to look like the Amsterdam apartment where the teenage Jewish diarist hid with her family from the Nazis during World War II.

According to its website, the recently opened Escape Bunker in the town of Valkenswaard has a room styled to look like the apartment. As part of the game, visitors are locked in and have to escape within an hour using teamwork, creativity and ?out-of-the-box? thinking.

The Anne Frank foundation, which manages the museum in the canal-side house that includes the Frank family?s hidden apartment, said the apartment was one of the places where the Holocaust played out and said, ?It shows very little empathy for survivors of the [Holocaust] to use the annex as a backdrop for an escape room.?

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, calling it ?an educational experience.?

Anne Frank became posthumously famous for the diary she kept while her family was hiding from the Nazis. The teenager died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, shortly before it was liberated by Allied forces.