#11 – Visit the Anne Frank house

The diary which Anne Frank wrote while captive and in hiding during the Second World War was another book which really impacted me when I read it as a teenager.  To read the story of another teenager who had such a different life to my own, who faces such struggles and yet is still, in so many ways, a normal teenager, I found really challenging. 

When I first heard that the house where she and her family had hidden was open as a museum I knew that one day I would have to visit it.  So when I arranged my visit to Amsterdam this was on the must do list.  We got started early on our final tour day as we knew that the queues can really build up at the Anne Frank museum.  Because of our wonderful museum cards we didn’t need to stand in a long line, but the more people coming in the more crowded the museum.

It was challenging to walk around the small area they all lived in and amazing to try to imagine what it must have been like to be forced to live here.  Although the area was actually bigger than I had imagined, to share it between so many people, with no chance of ever getting fully away from the other people you live with or to be able to just walk down the street, and to live in constant fear of being heard or discovered drastically shrinks the comfortableness of the area.  All the actual hiding rooms are kept empty and as it has been left after the occupants were discovered, arrested and taken away by the Nazis.  The museum items and video interviews explaining the history and looking at the lives of the occupants, particularly of Anne Frank and her family are placed throughout the areas which were previously the factory.  They are fascinating glimpses into lives so much bigger than the story of those few years, and lives which could have been so different.

Even as early as we got there it was busy and I found it hard to really engage when there were so many people that you were kept moving in a mass.  But it was still a very sobering hour or so during the tour and very thought provoking.   

I am really glad to have had the opportunity to see the house and to remember what can and did happen.  I am also so glad that Anne Frank responded to the suggestion to keep a diary to tell the war story.  More than that I am grateful that her father was courageous enough to get it published and willing to re-live the pain in order to open the museum.  It IS important that we remember!

I think that for me seeing this tour in isolation would have left me quite down, but set against the hope I had experienced seeing the Corrie Ten Boom house it was good to see different sides of the story, and to focus on the humanity and the potential for kindness and love even in the midst of the darkest situations.