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.

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."