The Anne Frank House

On my first trip to Amsterdam, Kees and I did not have time to visit the Anne Frank house.  Five years later, I returned alone.  As I rode the train into the city, I knew what I wanted to do.  Besides return visits to the Rijks and Van Gogh Museums, I wanted to see the house where the Frank family hid during World War II. .

First, after I stepped down from the train, I went to the tourist bureau in the station and booked a room.  The  hotel was the same vintage as the one where David and I stayed in Paris: an old building in a row of equally old buildings, probably built in the 18th Century.  

My room was on the second floor.  In Paris David and I climbed a narrow, winding stairway.  In Amsterdam the stairs went straight up, the narrowest, steepest steps I ever saw.  Each tread seemed to be nine inches high and only six inches deep.

I unpacked and then, using Dutch coins I’d exchanged dollars for at the train station, I boarded a trolley.  Just before a bridge over a canal, the driver, who spoke excellent English, told me it was time to get off.  I stepped down, and there she was: a little statue of Anne, looking more like a Degas ballerina than a Dutch teenager, with her birth and death dates: 1929-1945.

I was stunned.  I also was born in 1929.  Somehow I never realized Anne and I were the same age.  I’ve had this incredible life – not always easy but always interesting and definitely long.  I am now 83; she died before she had a chance to live.

I walked along the sidewalk with a row of typical old Amsterdam townhouses facing the canal.
There was no street, just a sidewalk without a railing between the houses and the waters of the canal.  In mid-block two adjoining houses bore signs identifying the Anne Frank House and Museum. 

I’d read Anne’s diary, seen the movie, and my daughter played Anne’s sister in a high school production of the play.  Yet I never understood the typography of the house. 

I climbed another of those long, narrow, steep stairways. (Are they typical of Amsterdam?)  I walked along the second floor hallway to where the bookcase stood ajar.  Yes, there really was a bookcase hiding a low doorway.  I slipped around the bookcase and onto a kind of bridge to an entirely separate building. 

The hideaway consisted of several small rooms on two floors connected by a small interior stairway.  Here is where during World War II the Frank family and other Jews hid from the Nazis for several years before being betrayed and taken to death camps. 

There were windows, but I can’t remember what they looked out on.  Evidently the Franks felt secure enough not to fear being seen from the building behind. 

All the furniture was gone.  In Anne’s room I saw the tattered and faded newspaper photos pasted on the wall.  That’s where Anne became real to me.  She was the one who cut out and fastened to the wall the picture of two little girls, the English princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret.  They were about the same ages as Anne and her sister.  Margaret lived to middle-age and died years ago, a fat and largely forgotten princess.  Elizabeth still reigns as the gray-haired Queen of England.  On Anne’s wall they remained forever children.

Just as Anne remains forever a young teenager, a symbol of man’s cruelty to man.