Echos from Amsterdam

View from the front of Anne Frank House

I stood transfixed in the incredibly small room staring at the faded wallpaper marking where images of hope, glamour, and escapism once hung. Here she sat, wrote, cried and dreamt. All I could think of was how my outstretched arms could almost touch the walls.

With a sense of time standing still I made my way through the rest of the Annex and didn’t return to the modern world until I stepped out into the cool mid-day breeze.

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267 Prinsengracht, the location of the Anne Frank House, is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Amid the sex shops, coffeehouses, bicycles and Heineken lies one of the most remarkable memorial museums in the world.

With a line wrapping around the block on a Sunday morning as the bells from Westerkerk Church ring, it is impossible to ignore the impact this 13-year-old made on modern day society.

Westerkerk Belltower

The Museum itself has taken over the building next door to the infamous Secret Annex (Number 263), located in the upper levels of Otto Frank’s former place of work, the Opekta Spice Company. Quotes adorn the freshly painted walls. Interviews of friends and helpers to the Annex clan play on TVs while tourists watch in a variety of languages. Pictures are forbidden, making the experience more like a church or memorial than a museum.  The lines of foreigners weave through the small rooms, and up the steep stairs. I catch my breath as I approach the bookcase door I’ve read so much about. It looks exactly how I always pictured it.

Ducking under the doorway it feels as if I’m entering a time warp, or a tomb. Personnel effects and furniture has been moved out, but the movie-magazine pictures on Anne’s wall still remain. The rooms are more like small closets, connecting from one to the other, even closer quarters than I’ve imagined. “Upstairs” is nothing more than a few steps up the landing. The attic where she, “looked out at the blue sky, the bare chestnut tree glistening with dew, the seagulls and other birds glinting with silver as they swooped through the air,” connects to the modern day museum and lobby. I catch a glimpse of the outside world through slotted windows, and snap an illegal picture.

    

Passageway between the Annex and Museum

Downstairs, near the exit and gift shop, lies the best memory of the morning. Encased in a glass podium is the red plaid diary. It is the diary that invited millions into the real-life world of World War II. The diary that so eloquently contemplated life, love, and evil it’s hard to believe that “a young girl” wrote it.

Inside the gift shop, the miracle and reality of Anne Frank’s legacy assaults you. Copies of her diary in every language imaginable can be found there. Every edition, every version is there; photo albums, annotated, unedited, and original. Literature explaining the current Anne Frank House and its sister organizations covers every surface. The organization that Otto Frank started after realizing he was the only Annex survivor, has grown exponentially. His efforts to publish his daughter’s work were have been paid back a thousand times over.

The old Opekta building, 263 Prinsengracht, which housed the location of The Secret Annex.

Re-reading the 413-page book (1995 Definitive Ed.) for the first time since I was thirteen was an eye-opener. This is a girl who is insightful, who has incredible potential, and who is just trying to grow up. She started her diary because, “Mr. Bolkestein, the Cabinet Minister, speaking on the Dutch Broadcast from London, said that after the war, a collection would be made of diaries and letters”. She decided she wanted to be a writer, a journalist. She knew she was different and unconventional compared to those around her and she wanted to take a stand. She wanted to prove them wrong.

In some ways she accomplished all of these goals. Anne brought awareness and a heart-breaking reality to the Holocaust. Though many others have written about it, and will continue to memorialize it in various ways, her words and ideas alone have touched millions. I’ve seen the concentration camps and Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, read multitudes of accounts, and talked to survivors first hand but it is her words that have left the longest lasting impression on my mind. Maybe if she had lived her diary never would have been published. Maybe it would have been been published but polished, less sincere. Maybe she would have gone on to do even greater things. Either way the Anne Frank House, sitting proudly alongside the quiet Amsterdam canal, serves as a little morsel of redemption for what history had in store for this young girl.
Click here to learn more about the Anne Frank House.

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