Anne Frank House Amsterdam

Anne Frank House Amsterdam

Since my daughter is playing Anne Frank in a Living Museum school project, I thought it would be a good opportunity to post here my impressions of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam from our October, 2012 visit. 

 

Amsterdam Anne Frank House

Anne Frank House

10-25-2012

After a 45 minute wait in line we entered Anne Frank's hiding place at 263 Prinsengracht, overlooking the canal (gracht ) of the same name.  (Unfortunately, I was unable to take pictures inside so had to clip those below from public sources.)  For a good online summary of the house with pictures of the neighborhood, click here.

It was predictably depressing and haunting for days afterward.

Annelies Frank was born 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt am Main in Germany.  She would have been 3 months older than my father.  They fled Nazi Germany in 1933 for Amsterdam, where they hoped to create a new life for themselves.

There was a June 1935 class picture showing her Montessori school class. The Jewish children including 6 year-old Anne were all numbered with their deaths and dates listed on a legend.  17 of the 30 students were Jewish.   10 of those 17 died in the camps.

In 1940, the Germans invaded Holland, instituting the same brutal antisemitic policies they had elsewhere.  

In the Concertgebouw (concert hall) where we listened to a cello concert, Seyss- Inquart, Reichs Commissaris for the German occupied Netherlands gave a speech, frequently interrupted by enthusiastic applause:  

And I would like to take this opportunity to say something about the Jewish question. We do not consider the Jews to be members of the Dutch nation. The Jews for us are not Dutch. They are an enemy with whom we cannot have a cease fire nor make peace. Do not expect me to set this down as a regulation except in police measures. We will hit the Jews where we can. And those who help them will be hit just as hard.

Rental records from Frank's neighborhood from 1942 to 1943 showed that most if not all had "moved out" the apparent euphemism for deportation or gone into hiding.  

Anne Frank at age 13.

Anne Frank (right) and her older sister Margot.  

There were many photographs and even a film of her including a May 1942 photo taken two months before she went into hiding; no photographs were taken of her again.

Last known photo of Anne Frank.

We saw the postcard they sent to their relatives in Basel, Switzerland, on 6 July 1942, the day they decided to go into hiding following an SS summons for Anne's older sister.

I downloaded and reread her Diary before and after the visit and it was eerie seeing the same neighborhood sights, hearing the same church bells that she wrote about.  I really don't think you can appreciate her precocious insight and the poignancy of this book unless you are reading it as a father of a teenage daughter.

"A voice in me screams: go outside," she wrote after years of claustrophobic isolation.  It must have been like living in a submarine.  "Not being able to go outside upsets me more than I can say, and I’m terrified our hiding place will be discovered and that we’ll be shot. That, of course, is a fairly dismal prospect."

"In the evenings when it’s dark, I often see long lines of good, innocent people, accompanied by crying children, walking on and on, ordered about by a handful of men who bully and beat them until they nearly drop. No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children, babies and pregnant women—all are marched to their death... I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed, while somewhere out there my dearest friends are dropping from exhaustion or being knocked to the ground. I get frightened myself when I think of close friends who are now at the mercy of the cruelest monsters ever to stalk the earth. And all because they’re Jews."

She tried to imagine a postwar world but it became increasingly difficult. "I simply can't imagine the world will ever be normal again for us," she wrote on 8 November 1943.  "I do talk about 'after the war' but it's as if I were talking about a castle in the air, something that can never come true."

Yet the striking thing about the diary is its banality, how life went on despite the terror beyond the secret annex.  After a fight with her father in March 1944 she wrote him a letter declaring "You must not and cannot regard me as 14. I've grown older because of all the misery."

She even learned shorthand through a weekly correspondence course (in one of her helper's names of course):  "I’m also working away at my shorthand, which I enjoy. Of the three of us, I’ve made the most progress."

She had an innocent, child's sort of faith, although she admitted not knowing why those who seemed as devout as anyone (she was from a liberal, assimilated family) were dying:  "I can’t help her [a friend who had been arrested but would ironically survive]. I can only stand by and watch while other people suffer and die. All I can do is pray to God to bring her back to us...Dear God, I have everything I could wish for, while fate has her in its deadly clutches. She was as devout as I am, maybe even more so, and she too wanted to do what was right. But then why have I been chosen to live, while she’s probably going to die? What’s the difference between us? Why are we now so far apart?"  She had survivor's guilt yet the irony of course was that her survival was not assured.  "God has not forsaken me, and He never will," she wrote four months before she was to be arrested and less than a year before she would die.

On 4 August 1944 at 10:30 am following a tip from someone whose identity remains unknown, she and her family were arrested by three Dutch agents and an Austrian SS officer.

They were sent to Auschwitz but as the Russian troops approached, Anne and her sister were transferred to Bergen-Belsen.

Otto Frank, her father, was the only one of those in hiding to survive.  He was saved on 27 January 1945 when Auschwitz was liberated; he was in the infirmary at the time.

Auschwitz in January, 1945; there were only 7,650 survivors.

He didn't know it at the time but his daughter, Anne, was still alive.

In fact, a childhood friend, Hannah Gosler, who was Jewish but also had Paraguayan citizenship so was kept in a better camp neighboring Bergen-Belsen, managed to meet her twice, tossing a Red Cross package over the barbed wire.  Her sister had died, Anne said, and now she had no one. It just wasn't right. She didn't know that her father was still alive.  She died of typhus two months after her father had been liberated, in March 1945 at Bergen-Belsen. Her sister   died in February 1945 of the same cause.

Mass Grave #3 at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.

Memorial for Anne and her sister at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.

The Germans were meticulous record-keepers: we saw the index card with Anne Frank's information and date of death (March 9, 1944) next to a cross.

Peter van Pels who appears prominently in her diary almost made it, but died on 5 May 1945 in a camp in Austria.

On 21 May 1945, Anne's father Otto wrote to his mother in Basel, Switzerland:  

I hope that these lines get to you bringing you and and all the ones I love news that I have been saved by the Russians, that I am well, and being looked after well in every respect. Where Edith and the children are I do not know. We have been apart since 5 September 1944. I merely heard that they had been transported to Germany.

Otto Frank wandered back to Amsterdam where he arrived on 3 June 1945

to a joyful reunion with those who had helped him.  All had survived.  He learned en route that his wife had died, but he had heard nothing about his daughters, so waited.

   When Anne's death was confirmed a secretary who had discovered her diary gave it unread to her father who decided to publish it to personalize the Holocaust and as a literary work in its own right.

It's been translated into about 75 languages and made into numerous plays and movies, including one that won Shelley Winters an Oscar for her portrayal of Mrs. Van Dan.  The actress donated the Oscar to the museum and there it was - a shiny gold Oscar up close and personal.
In all, 103,000 Jews were deported from the Netherlands to die in concentration camps. Amsterdam was particularly hard-hit losing three- fourths of its prewar Jewish population. The Jewish quarter was razed.

There are countless Anne Franks out there right now, children and young people growing up in war and occupation, targeted for death by people they have never met simply because they are the wrong religion, ethnicity, political party, or sexual orientation (a memorial to the tens of thousands of homosexuals murdered by the Nazis was also nearby).  The horror of her story is not its uniqueness but its almost mind-numbing regularity before and since World War II.  Our species has this strange compulsion to round up and kill other members of our own species, something unique in the animal world (except among other primates), for the most arbitrary of reasons.  If we don't acknowledge, study, and dismantle this compulsion, the cycle of industrialized cruelty will continue.