Anne Frank House

The canal water moves slowly outside. A narrow brick house faces the Prinsengracht, tall and a little leaning, much like its neighbors. From the street, you might walk past it without a second look. But inside these walls, eight people once stayed hidden and silent for just over two years.

The house was built in 1635. For a long time it held workshops and storerooms, like much of this canal district. In the twentieth century, the front rooms became business premises. A company called Opekta worked here. It was run by a German man named Otto Frank, who had moved his family to Amsterdam from Germany in the 1930s.

Otto Frank was Jewish. So were his wife, Edith, and their two daughters, Margot and Anne. After Germany occupied the Netherlands in 1940, life for Jewish families grew narrow and dangerous. New rules stripped away their freedom, step by step. By 1942, the threat of arrest and deportation was real and very close.

In July 1942, the family went into hiding. They moved into a set of rooms at the back of the building. These rooms are known as the Achterhuis, the back house, or the secret annex. The entrance was concealed behind a bookcase that could swing aside. Anyone passing through the offices would not guess that people were living just beyond it.

Eight people shared the annex. The four members of the Frank family. Then Hermann and Auguste van Pels, with their son Peter. Later, a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer joined them. A few trusted office workers knew the secret and protected it. Among them were Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, and Victor Kugler. Day after day, they carried up food and news at great risk to themselves. Without them, hiding here would not have been possible.

For more than two years, they lived in these rooms. During the working day they kept very still, because people in the warehouse below could hear any noise. They could not open the windows. They could not step outside. They read, they studied, they argued, and they waited. The war went on, just beyond the curtains.

Next to the house rises the tower of the Westerkerk, a church from the seventeenth century. Its bell marked the passing hours. Anne wrote about that sound in her diary, and she found it comforting. For people who could not go out, the chime was a thread that tied them to the city and to ordinary time.

Anne Frank was thirteen when the hiding began. Just before, for her birthday in June 1942, she had been given a diary. She wrote in it often. She set down the people around her, her fears, her hopes, and her wish to become a writer one day. Her words were honest and sharp, a teenager recording an impossible situation in plain language.

In August 1944, the hiding came to an end. The annex was discovered, and all eight people were arrested. They were taken first to a camp in the Netherlands, then deported to concentration camps in the east. Of the eight, only Otto Frank survived the war. Anne and her sister Margot died in the Bergen-Belsen camp in early 1945, just months before the fighting stopped.

After the war, Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam, the only one of the eight to come back. It was Miep Gies who had gathered Anne's scattered diary papers after the arrest and kept them safe, unread. She handed them to him. Reading his daughter's words, Otto decided the world should see them. The diary was published in 1947. Since then it has been read in many languages, in almost every part of the world.

The house opened as a museum in 1960. Much of it was left bare, on purpose. The rooms of the annex hold no furniture. When the residents were taken away, the rooms were emptied, and Otto Frank asked that they stay that way. That emptiness is part of what the place has to say. On one wall, you can still see pictures that Anne pasted up, magazine cuttings and photographs, the marks of a young person making a closed room her own.

Today the museum spreads through the old house and the building beside it. You move along a fixed route, up steep Dutch staircases, from the offices into the annex itself. Displays along the way explain the wider war and the fate of millions of others caught in it. The single house comes to stand for a loss far larger than itself.

The annex is quiet now. Light falls through the same windows that the family could not open. One girl's notebook turned this narrow back house into a place the world remembers. Stand here for a moment, and listen. You begin to hear how loud a small, silent space can be.