AN ORDINARY HOUSE IN AMSTERDAM

During our recent visit to Europe, we were privileged to experience some of its great cities and museums as well as spectacular scenery while traveling the Danube by riverboat. However, nothing prepared us for the emotional journey of walking through the Anne Frank House in the Netherlands.

The horrors of Nazi anti-Semitism have turned an ordinary house in Amsterdam into an extraordinary place to remember the past so as not to repeat it. The Anne Frank House is a museum with a story. As a visitor, you experience this story through quotes, photos, videos and original items. The atmosphere in the museum is authentic and subdued.

The Anne Frank House is a tribute to hope and resistance against evil. It is also a stark reminder of the inevitable end game of unchecked persecution and discrimination. Of the 150,000 Jews living in Netherlands at the start of WWII, 70 percent did not survive.

Each year, over a million visitors purchase timed tickets to enter the museum. The walk-through experience is enhanced by the preservation of many personal effects of the Frank family. The warehouse and offices of Anne’s father, Otto Frank, can be seen as you move from room to room learning about the German occupation of the Netherlands.  The account of Anne’s brief life, the world events that surrounded her and her family, and the writing of her diary are the themes presented in the small exhibition space.

The visit began with a chronology of photos, narrated by a young woman who could have been Anne’s older sister. She summarized the rise of Nazi Germany and its devastating effect on the Frank family. This was followed by a self-guided tour of the actual Frank House. The climax was the small “secret annex” where the family hid in silence from the Gestapo for two years. During the day, the Frank Family had to maintain complete silence, so workers in the building did not hear them. They had to refrain from speaking, running water, or flushing the toilet.

The holocaust was the systematic state-sponsored murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. It took place throughout Europe between 1933 and 1945.  I have attended numerous holocaust exhibits and memorials including the National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. None of these much larger exhibits had the immediate emotional impact on me as the Anne Frank House.

The slaughter of six million people is almost beyond human comprehension. Most survivors of the death camps have now passed on. However, the brutal death of a bright, inquisitive young girl, who loved to document her experiences and thoughts in a diary, is personal and gut wrenching. Everyone can relate to a life full of promise cut short by evil. Like a famous painting, Anne’s home, hiding place and most of all her diary will live on forever.

Anne was born in Germany and was forced to leave her friends when Hitler came to power. The family relocated to Amsterdam where Anne’s father, Otto, founded a company that traded in pectin, a gelling agent for making jam. Before long, Anne felt comfortable in the Netherlands. She learned the language, made new friends, and went to a Dutch school near her home. Events took a turn for the worse on May 10, 1940.  The Nazis invaded the Netherlands, and the country quickly surrendered.

The German occupation began introducing laws and regulations that made the lives of Jews intolerable. All Jewish children were forced to attend separate Jewish schools, and Anne, again, was separated from her close friends. Rumors began circulating that all Jews would be deported from the Netherlands and forced into work camps. The Frank family concealed themselves in the secret annex with help from a few non-Jewish friends.

On her thirteenth birthday, just before the family went into hiding, Anne was given a diary. During the two years in the secret annex, Anne wrote about daily events, but also about her feelings and thoughts.  She wrote short stories, started on a novel, and copied passages from the books she read into her Book of Beautiful Sentences. Writing helped her pass the time and gave her purpose. 

Anne and the other people in hiding were discovered and arrested by police officers on August 4, 1944.  Anne and her sister contracted typhus in February 1945 and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Otto Frank was the only family member to survive the death camps. Without the Anne Frank diary and her father’s diligent efforts to publish it, the museum and its message would not exist. The Diary of a Young Woman has been published into more than seventy languages. Most versions are available in the museum gift shop. I have never read this famous book. The Anne Frank House Museum helped to correct this oversight by quoting liberally from her diary throughout the exhibits.

The popularity of the book inspired a 1955 play and a 1959 movie. The writing is often included on lists honoring the top books of the twentieth century.

As we toured Europe, there were no museums or exhibits commemorating Adolf Hitler, the writing of Mein Kampf, or the rise of Nazism. Instead, we have the hiding place and writings of a young girl to guarantee that her important story is preserved. In the words of Otto Frank, “To build up a future, you have to know the past.”