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Anne
Frank's Spirit Lives on in Amsterdam
by Laurie Williams Sowby
The
house where her family and friends hid for more than two years is
preserved as a museum that promotes tolerance. Anne would have been
75 years old this month.
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Hiding
place: The house at 263 Prinsengracht
was where Anne Frank's family hid for two years, and where
her diary was born. (Photo by Laurie Williams Sowby) |
AMSTERDAM
-- The lines are long, even early on a wet, cold morning. The four-story
brick facade rises between similar-looking houses on Prinsengracht,
beside one of Amsterdam's canals. It stands like many others along
the quiet cobblestone street, its appearance unremarkable.
But
this place, No. 263, was the hiding place for the Frank family and
four other Jewish friends during the Holocaust. It was here that,
for 25 months, beginning July 6, 1942, Otto and Edith Frank, their
daughters Margot and Anne, friends Mr. and Mrs. van Daan,
the van Daans' son Peter, and Mr. Dussel
avoided detection by the Nazis.
It
was here that young Anne began her record of their isolation, writing
in the new red-and-white plaid-covered diary she had received for
her 13th birthday on June 12. The family went into hiding three
weeks later.
The
front part of the house -- where visitors enter and ascend the steep
stairs to the first floor -- had served as Otto Frank's business
before he took his family into hiding in the back part. (To all
appearances, he had fled the country.) There, in the secret annex
below the attic, he had stored some food and other supplies, as
well as furniture, preparing for the inevitable.
The
Hiding Place
A
specially built revolving bookcase hid the entrance to the hiding
place. The windows behind it were covered with opaque paper, and
others were veiled with heavy curtains and kept closed; only the
trap door in the attic provided fresh air at night. The family could
never risk going outside, although they often went down the narrow
stairs behind the bookcase into the office at night to listen to
the radio.
The
visitor gets some idea of the fear and isolation those hiding here
must have experienced -- and of the daily boredom that most of us
these days would find suffocating -- in a walk through the house,
which opened as a museum in 1960. More than a half million people
visit the Anne Frank Huis every year.
The
rooms are bare; the Nazis ordered all furnishings confiscated after
they discovered the occupants who'd been in hiding two years. In
the first room -- once the sleeping room of Otto and Edith Frank
and their older daughter -- a map of Normandy hangs on the wall.
On it, Otto Frank traced the advance of
Allied troops.
Anne's
room, next door, was shared with Mr. Dussel.
The walls still bear the magazine cut-outs of her favorite movie
stars -- Anne's way of cheering up a cheerless space. In this room,
she sat at her desk and penned the diary whose message of hope has
reached over half a century.
The
toilet and sink in the next room could only be used outside of office
hours, because the water and drain pipes ran through the wall of
the warehouse which lay partially below the hiding place.
Up
a steep stairway, Mr. and Mrs. van Daan
shared a combined bedroom/living room where those in hiding spent
a lot of time cooking, reading, studying, exercising, and conversing
-- in whispers only -- during the day.
Peter
van Daan's small room is adjacent to the living room. In it, more
steep stairs lead to the attic, where Anne often went to be alone,
to gather her thoughts, to try to make sense of their situation.
Isolation
Anne
wrote on Nov. 8, 1943:
"I
see the eight of us in the Annex as if we were a patch of blue sky
surrounded by menacing black clouds. The perfectly round spot on
which we're standing is still safe, but the clouds are moving in
on us, and the ring between us and the approaching danger is being
pulled tighter and tighter. We're surrounded by darkness and danger,
and in our desperate search for a way out we keep bumping into each
other.
"We
look at the fighting down below and the peace and beauty up above.
In the mean time, we've been cut off by the dark mass of clouds,
so that we can go neither up nor down. It looms before us like an
impenetrable wall, trying to crush us, but not yet able to. I can
only cry out and implore, `Oh, ring, ring, open wide and let us
out!'"
Three
months later, she wrote, "I feel as if I were about to explode
. . . I walk from one room to another, breathe through the in the
window frame . . . "
The
Inevitable
It's
hard not to imagine the fugitives in hiding as one walks through
the space they inhabited for 761 days.
A
larger front room of the house has been given over to large displays
of family photographs and glass cases housing Anne's original writings.
An upright glass case contains various copies of her famous diary,
published in 55 languages since its first publication in the Netherlands
in 1947.
When
the family's hiding place was at last revealed by someone (perhaps
a suspicious warehouse worker), the eight Jews were arrested and
taken away on the morning of Aug. 4, 1944. Secretary and friend
Miep Gies went
back to the annex late in the afternoon and, sorting through the
disarray left by the soldiers, found Anne's diary. After the war,
she returned it to Anne's father -- the sole survivor of the eight
-- saying, "Here's your daughter's legacy to you."
Anne
and her sister died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp in Germany in March 1945, just a few weeks before British troops
liberated that camp.
Anne's
Diary
Anne,
who recognized her gift for writing and aspired to be a professional
writer some day, had carefully edited her words. But, apparently,
her father felt some subjects too sensitive and omitted parts of
his daughter's diary when typing it up for friends to read. It was
limited even more by space when it was published a year later under
Anne's title, "The Secret Annex." Another, more complete
translation by Susan Massotty, "The
Diary of a Young Girl, The Definitive Edition," has been published
by Doubleday.
But
both the original version and the new one echo Anne Frank's desire
to leave a lasting legacy: "I want to be useful or bring enjoyment
to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living
even after my death!"
Indeed,
she has. And the fight against prejudice, and discrimination goes
on in museum exhibits and through programs sponsored by the museum.
Many visitors, subdued already, are close to tears as they survey
her words, enlarged in the display, and feel Anne Frank's indomitable
spirit:
"I
still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good
at heart. It's utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation
of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world slowly being transformed
into a wilderness. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when
I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that this cruelty will end
and that peace and tranquillity will return."
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