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Amsterdam

Amsterdam-The Anne Frank house and museum

Introduction

Amsterdam visit 3

Prinsengracht to Boeremarkt

Anne Frank house

Westerkerk and Van Gogh museum
Stedelijk Museum of modern and contemporary art

Concertgebouw-Sarphatipark

Amsterdam and Jews

Kroller Muller Museum

Next landmark, already in sight, is another famous church in Amsterdam: the “WESTERKERK” (West church), its tower capped by a blue orb and crown and a gilded weathercock. It is perhaps the prettiest of the four 17th-century churches built at the four compass points around the city centre. But before reaching it, cross the canal and join the queue at no.263 Prinsengracht, the ANNE FRANK HOUSE.
Open every day June to September 9-19.00 H and 10.00 on Sundays. Winter it closes at 17.00 hours. Closed on 25th December, 1st January and Yom Kippur.
This is a memorial museum that an Amsterdam visitor cannot ignore. Whatever the reason: curiosity, homage, pilgrimage, you will not leave unharmed. The extreme simplicity of the site, its care to show the truth in its most sad dimension, makes it a particularly moving visit.
A brief reminder. When Holland was brutally invaded by the German troops on May 10, 1940, and Holland’s Jewish population was slowly being rounded up by the nazis for deportation to the famous German holiday camps, Otto Frank who had fled Frankfurt in 1933, shared the tragic conditions of Amsterdam’s Jews. This is his house on Prinsengracht 263. In fact two houses: one in façade, spice boutique of Otto and a back house where the whole family Frank went into hiding from July 1942 up to August 4 1944 when they were betrayed to the nazis.

The Frank family, employees (the Van Daan family and a dentist named Dussel), also Jews, and an assistant lived for 2 years in this secluded space. During these two years the youngest daughter Anne, kept an intimate diary about her caged childhood. Day by day, with her vision of an extremely mature and sensible child, she wrote the slightest details of her life, that of her family, until their arrest. On 4th August 1944, the Germans raid the apartment, going without any hesitation to the library-hidden door leading to the hiding place. They search all over the place, the diary is left on the floor, while the adult family is deported to Auschwitz. Anne and her sister Margot are sent to Bergen –Belsen another concentration camp where they will die of typhus disease in March 1945.
Otto, the father will be the only survivor, liberated by Soviet troops. He returns to Amsterdam where one of his former employees, gives him Anne’s diary. He publishes it under the name “”Het achterhuis” (the back house), the name Anne herself had chosen. The book, thanks to its simplicity and evoking force, is translated into 50 languages and became the symbol of the MURDERED INNOCENCE. The house escaped demolition and is now the Anne Frank museum.
Today, the secret rooms are one of the most moving spots in Amsterdam. You are invited to use the hidden library door to enter the annex.

Hiding from war, by Moore

You visit different empty rooms, where the familiesstayed.  In the first room, a small Normandy map indicating the Allies progression after the landing, next to the children’s growth measurements. In Anne’s room, you can still see the black and white pictures of magazine cutout movie stars. That was her way of dreaming a little bit….In a larger room: a maquette reconstitutes the whole house. A footbridge, built after the war, gives you the possibility to join the “front-house where you can see a permanent exhibition. Several foreign publishings of the diary are shown in a display window, with pictures of the Frank family and different documents pointing out the new racist outbursts, racial exclusions, revisionist books. These are staggering and educative documents, not only mentioning historical facts, but making the connection between what’s happening today. The Steven Spielberg project of enlarging and renovating the site should be terminated today.

Bibliography

Holland, by Adam Hopkins (Faber and Faber, 1988), Penguin Guide to Amsterdam (ed.Vincent Westzaan, Penguin 1990), Guide du Routard 1998 (ed.Hachette), -Dwalen door Amsterdam en reizen door de Benelux, ( ed. Lekturama 1984), “Amsterdam:The life of a city” by Geoffrey Cotterell (Saxon house 1974), “The diary of Anne Frank” (various publishers, on sale at the Anne Frank house)