I visited Amsterdam this past weekend, the first time I’ve been there other than in passage through the airport. It is customary (my German language edition of the Amsterdam Baedeker says “required”) to visit the Anne Frank House at Prinzengracht 263, the site of her father, Otto Frank’s business, and where the Frank family and four other Jews hid from the Nazis for two years in “het Achterhuis”, the house behind or as it has come to be called in English, “the secret Annex”.

I walked from Central Station to the Prinzengracht house arriving there about 11:00 on a Sunday morning. The line to get in stretched around the corner but the wait was only about a half hour and that didn’t seem to long to me to gain access to where an icon of Holocaust history and literature, Anne’s diary was written.

The “museum” is principally the house itself with some video documentation (for example, an interview with Miep Gies), some photographs, a few original, historical documents, and of course, the original three, bound notebooks of Anne’s diary, including the famous, first volume in its red and white checked cover. The false bookcase built to conceal the stairway to the hidden annex is there, partially ajar, and one passes through it to mount the stairs as the Franks and the others did.

I was moved as I always am by my present-day encounters with the Holocaust. I was particularly affected by passing the bookcase and climbing the stairs to the secret Annex. However, and this is the major point of this Blog post, I was relatively, or perhaps I should say comparatively unmoved by the overall experience. I should say that, besides the bookcase and the initial stepping into the hiding place, I was most affected by two things:

(1) a video of Otto Frank, in one of the last rooms of the exhibit. As the only survivor of those hiding in Prinzengracht, Otto Frank on his return from Auschwitz, tried to learn the fates of his two daughters. He had already learned that his wife had not survived. In this video, made I believe sometime in the 1970s, Frank discusses what the tragedy of the loss of his daughters meant to him. Also in this room are several letters he wrote to relatives in the period immediately after the war while he searched for information on Margot and Anne. They describe his growing and then confirmed knowledge that they had, in fact, died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; and

(2) a quote on the wall of this final room, from the chemist and writer, Primo Levi, himself a survivor of Auschwitz. Levi comments on the importance of Anne Frank and her diary in making the Holocaust real and immediate to those who did not experience it personally. He also points out that the reality of this one girl’s fate, tragic as it was, was mirrored by the fates of at least one million other Jewish children and many non-Jews and, Levi says, to try and understand or come to terms with that catastrophe is an impossible task leading only to despair and an inability to continue to live on. Levi himself, ultimately found it impossible to live with the reality of the Holocaust, and killed himself.


I would like to conclude by noting that in the people around me today visiting the Secret Annex were two, young, German girls, perhaps in their mid teens and an Israeli family. What they thought and felt I do not know, but they were there.