Kastner takes on new role with Anne Frank House

After a long career as the managing editor of the Stratford Beacon Herald and several years as the general manager of the Stratford Perth Museum, John Kastner has added another chapter to his already storied professional life.

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Announced Friday morning, Kastner is the new co-ordinator of Anne Frank House exhibits in Canada.

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Despite retiring from the museum in December 2023, Kastner said he felt he still had the energy and time to do something, but he wanted that something to be meaningful.

“I’m finding now, since I retired, you get approached for lots of stuff,” Kastner said. “Would you like to serve in this committee? Would you like to do this? Would you like to work here?’ And to me, one of the real criteria was I wanted it to be something meaningful.“

So when he was approached by Levien Rouw, the head of international affairs at the Anne Frank House, about replacing the outgoing Julie Couture, Kastner’s decision was an easy one. For a total of 25 to 30 hours a month, with a bit of traveling, there aren’t too many more impactful jobs out there, he said.

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“You think, here we are 75 years later, and that exhibit is called: A Story for Today, and it’s a story for today,” Kastner said. “It’s relevant today. . . . Anti-Semitism is, you know, the highest it’s been in decades.

“And it’s an important thing, and it’s meaningful, and that’s why it appealed to me.”

Kastner’s relationship with the Anne Frank House began in 2016, while he was still the general manager of the Stratford Perth Museum.

“We were one of a bunch of museums that was pursuing what they sort of called their skyline exhibit, which was their bigger exhibit. That year, the Stratford Festival was presenting The Diary of Anne Frank at the Avon Theater with Sara Farb,” Kastner said.

“And the Festival reached out to me and said that another museum had approached them and sort of wanted an endorsement from the Festival. . . . They said, ‘we would really prefer that the Stratford Perth Museum gets it.’”

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More than 10,000 people came through the museum to see the exhibit during that time, breaking a Canadian record and cementing the relationship with the Anne Frank Museum.

Later, Julie Couture, the previous co-ordinator for Anne Frank House exhibits in Canada, reached out to Kastner for help with storing and shipping exhibits.

“We took on some of those things. We looked after some of the shipping for them, looked after some of the storage for them. And then when (Couture) left — she took a different job — she suggested . . . ‘You might want to reach out to John. It’s something he might want to do.’”

If people can only take away one thing from the Anne Frank exhibits, which present the history of Nazi Germany and its persecution of the Jewish people alongside the story of Anne Frank and her family, it’s that “persecution matters, even what it’s not happening to you,” Kastner said.

“Everybody who goes through this exhibit, they have an ability to impact outcomes. You know, if you see somebody saying something — treating somebody some way, treating someone in a racist manner, — you’ve got the ability to make a change and say: Don’t do that, that’s not right, to stand up for somebody,” Kastner said.

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