Hans Westra (64) has announced he will resign as the director of the Anne Frank Foundation next year. He has worked for the foundation that operates the Achterhuis, the Amsterdam canal house where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis, for 35 years, 27 of which as its director. "You shouldn't exceed your own expiration date," Westra said in an interview in his office.

From there Westra can see the hiding places where the Frank family lived from 1942 until it was found and deported in 1944, and the yard with the famous tree that is now supported with poles. The rotting chestnut tree Anne wrote about in her diary made headlines two years ago when a court-case prevented it from being felled.

But despite international media attention for the fate of a tree, Westra has noticed it has become harder to get the story of Anne across. Young people don't grow up knowing the context of the Second World War, because the generation that has lived through it is disappearing. And because immigrant children don't have the historic connection with the war. "We have to be more active in schools. That's why we're doing a project where Turkish and Moroccan children become tour guides. That really works, but we have to keep feeding it," Westra said.

Puting Anne first

His current activities as director are far removed from what the Anne Frank Foundation focused on when it was founded in 1957 as a "wild lefty action group", in Westra's words. He has turned it into a professional organisation that puts the Anne Frank House and "Anne herself" first.

In the 1970s and 80s the foundation was active on different fronts. It spread condoms and pro-abortion leaflets and its members stood front row in all sorts of demonstrations. "We protested against nuclear bombs, against Janmaat [a nationalist politician who spoke out against immigrants]. In those years we were the resistance against all evil, so to speak."

Westra remembers how the museum and the foundation were really very different entities. "Americans lined up to see where Anne had lived, we got 200,000 visitors per year." But that was not something the foundation was particularly interested in. "We didn't care, but it brought in the money."

When he became the director in 1983 his protesting days were over. "I put the museum first, and I became opposed to politicising Anne. In 1984 agriculture minister Ad Ploeg called us a 'crypto-communist organisation'. That got us thinking about what we were doing."

Trauma on society

And the audience changed as well. "In the 1950s the Americans appropriated Anne Frank. A large number of our visitors are still from there, but we see more Dutch people and other Europeans now. Because of the big trauma on society the Second World War caused, it took years before people who had survived the camps for example were able to deal with the confrontation of other people's stories."

Having been born in 1945 Westra grew up in a non-Jewish house where the war was not talked about.

"After founding the foundation Otto Frank [Anne's father, the only one of the family who survived the war] said he did not want it to be a Jewish foundation. We have always had prominent Jewish members on our board, but I agree with Otto: it is about the confrontation with the story and that story is for everybody."

Westra did run into problems with the Anne Frank Fund, which was founded by Otto Frank in Basel. "That fund manages the diary texts - until 2016 that is, when the copyright expires," he said. "In the 80s they took us to court after we claimed the name Anne Frank. We won that case. The fund wanted to own the brand and said we planned to use it to sell jeans and teacups with her name on it. When all we wanted was to protect the name. Anne Frank is the most famous face of the Holocaust, so we must make sure that her name is not used for commercial purposes."

Disney movie

Westra said he wants to prevent Anne Frank's image from debasing. "Otto himself was more pragmatic about that. In the 50s he agreed to an American theatre production that portrayed Anne as a happy American girl and only touched on the Holocaust. And Disney is making a movie about her now."

But can Anne interest future generations? "That will be the great challenge for my successor," Westra said. "The story needs to be told and told again to fight discrimination, racism and anti-semitism. I think more than half of the population of Amsterdam now doesn't know what happened in the war."