The name Anne Frank is synonymous with Amsterdam, and we were determined to spend time to understand what this family and fellow Jews would have experienced at this point in history. The house, therefore, was high on our agenda to visit. Entry to the house was a little disappointing, as the development of a modern reception annex has been constructed to deal with the hundreds of thousands of tourists that visit annually.
Anne spent two years hidden in this house before their whereabouts were revealed to the Nazis in the summer of 1944. The sad irony is that Anne and her sister died of typhus in the notorious Belsen concentration camp only a week before the German surrender. Thankfully, her diaries survived, and her father had them published in 1947. They continue to express the thoughts and the determination of a young teenager to survive despite the odds. She failed, but her words didn’t!
The first part of the exhibition graphically shows life in Amsterdam in the 1940s. There are stills and "moving photos" showing the Nazi occupation, the dress enforcement of the yellow star, the formation of ghettos, and the imposing of unrealistic curfews. All this led Otto Frank to decide that if he and his family were to survive, they must hide away from the German oppressors. With help from his Dutch friends, Otto moved into the unused part of his company’s warehouse and the now-famous bookshelf was constructed. We wondered as we walked through the doorway with the permanently open bookcase door how the Frank family had not been detected earlier, but we guessed that in the 1940s, the layout of the buildings would have made it difficult to detect, despite the fact that the rear garden is no more than a courtyard that would have been shared by more than one household.
Certainly life in the restricted space of the annex must have been difficult to manage for the family, and it is evident as you follow the tourist trail that they became an insular and self-sufficient family. There is evidence of normality as you walk through the rooms—pencil marks on the walls showing the growth progress of the two Frank girls and posters on the bedroom wall (typical of a teenager). It is said that, other than maintaining the property and the obvious work downstairs, little has been done to the rooms. If this is the case, the family lived very frugally, and it would have been a stark contrast to the opulence they’d been used to in the main house.
There is so much to see here, and we all felt the emotional presence of the Frank family. I truly would defy anyone to leave here without experiencing feelings of bewilderment and astonishment for what happened with and to this family.
The museum is more than the Franks’ home; it’s a full portrayal of how minorities must struggle to survive. Enjoy—if that’s the right word.