There’s no business like “shoah” business.

Shoah is the Hebrew word for “catastrophe.” It’s used specifically to note the destruction of European Jewry during World War II.

Anne Frank, her diary and story, is well-known to millions across the globe. I won’t summarize it here except to say that she, her parents and sister, and a neighbor’s family share a tiny hidden apartment in a small factory in Amsterdam. They live there for approximately two years before they’re ratted out and arrested. Anne and her sister, Margot, are eventually sent to Bergen-Belsen** where they both died.

The Anne Frank House, now a museum, has been visited by millions of tourists to Amsterdam. Perhaps you’ve even visited it and were deeply moved as almost all are.

Now let’s put on our marketing hats and consider the value of owning one or more rental apartments and tourist lodging in/about the Anne Frank House location.

How would you market these units? With taste and discretion — or would you go for something, shall we say, a little more over the top?

The folks at AmsterdamStay.com decided on the latter. They thought it would be way fun for tourists to “live like Anne Frank” in a small, tight attic space which, though best for 2 could sleep 4, even more with mattresses on the floor.  Tall people are discouraged, however, since they could bump their heads.

The original “Live like Anne Frank” is gone now, but I’ve preserved it for you to see. It’s hard to believe that this didn’t start out as a vulgar copywriter’s joke (I do this kind of thing all the time, just to get it out of my system.) But then someone said, “Hey, now that’s a heckuva idea! Let’s run with that!”

And they did. Until I’m thinking they got enough screaming emails to revise the copy. This isn’t the first time Anne Frank has been used to sell stuff. Based on the popularity of Anne’s diary, a Japanese maker of sanitary napkins named its company, Anne Co. Now “Anne” is a term practically pseudonymous for menstruation. (I’d like to think that Anne might find that amusing.)

Not so, however, the circumstances of her and her family’s virtual imprisonment across the street.

You can read more about this and the growing European commercialism of “Jews as Brand” at Living Like Anne Frank. It gets me to wondering about the short and long-term effects that President-Elect Obama’s administration will have on ethnic/racial/urban memory and memorial marketing.

I’m dizzy running the possibilities in my head.

** Personal Note: I’ve always had a special feeling for Anne. There are members of my extended family who shared the same time and Bergen-Belsen filth, starvation and disease Anne and Margot did. Like Anne, my cousins were also teen-aged girls.

My cousins have always claimed to have known Anne and her sister in the camp, but I’m not so sure. I’ve always thought that by connecting themselves with Anne, true or otherwise, they were able to give their own stories greater meaning and universality. But unlike Anne, my cousins — 4 sisters, 1 son — all survived and came to America in the late 40s. They married, had children, made lives. They’re legacy isn’t a story but one of children and grandchildren. The eldest sister is now in her mid-80s. Their ancestral home, now in Ukraine, is a backwater where once stood a thriving center of Jewish life and culture.

Interestingly, I have the deed to one of the family homes there. My guess it no longer stands. But if it did, I’m wondering how I might market it to the tourists … “Only one degree will separate you from Anne Frank and her story when you …”

Like I said, this is the kind of thing you get out of your system before you actually start writing copy for real.