Anne Frank House

One of the places I really wanted to see was the Anne Frank House. Again, my public school education somewhat failed me, because I thought her home was in Germany. Turns out I was half right -- she and her family were Germans, but fled to The Netherlands to escape when the Nazis came to power and began to institute anti-Jewish legislation.

The home itself was a mixed-use building. The first floor served as a warehouse for a jam/jelly business and the second floor was used as offices. You are actually able to step through the secret door hidden by the infamous bookcase and see the area in which they hid. It was actually much bigger than I expected – they had two entire floors of the building. Black-out curtains kept the area very dimly lit and each person was required to hold still all day long so they wouldn’t make any noise. Anne’s room was narrow and had black and white magazine cutouts of various celebrities donning her walls.

They will never know who betrayed in Frank family, but as we all know they were discovered and taken to concentration camps. Friends of the family told stories of sneaking them food and supplies into the concentration camp by making packages and throwing them over the fences when the guards weren’t looking. Anne watched all the women in her family die before her and eventually gave up herself. Little did she know that her father was still alive and survived the whole ordeal. In fact, Anne died only a few weeks before the Allied forces came and liberated the camp. Who knows what type of person she would have become, especially considering what an amazing young woman she was?

This experience was made even more interesting because I had just finished reading Suite Franciase by Irene Nemrovisky who was a Jewish writer who lived in France. Similarly, she was killed during the Nazi occupation of France while her two daughters were chased all over Europe yet managed to stay in hiding until the end of the war. They lovingly carried the manuscript for Suite Francise with them the entire time, and it was later published as an unfinished novella -- a fictional account of the German occupation of France. It was so amazingly written, and under circumstances hauntingly similar to Anne Frank’s demise.

You can’t help but walk away from an experience like this with some serious questions about humankind. AC and I slowly strolled by the nearby "homomonument," which is a memorial to the gays and lesbians that lost their lives as well. Needing an emotional change of pace, we helped ourselves to a few glasses of red wine and talked about any positive subject we could think of.