Inside the Secret Annex
Posted by: Lydia in The Netherlands, tags: amsterdam, Europe, The Netherlands, TravelWhen Adrian suggested that we visit Amsterdam on our last day in Benelux, I realised that I would be able to visit the Anne Frank Haus. Reading “The Diary of a Young Girl” touched me deeply, and the thought that I would actually be able to walk through the Secret Annex was bizarre.
Photo from annefrank.org
Anne Frank started this diary on her 13th birthday in 1942 and continued it for two years. At the beginning, she simply is a young girl from a Jewish family, living in Amsterdam. By the end, she is living her whole life in hiding from the Germans who have occupied The Netherlands and who are sending Jews and so many others to concentration camps. She details her day-to-day life in her diary, confiding her thoughts and dreams. She states that after the war, she would like to publish her diary and become a Dutch writer.
Photo from annefrank.org
As I read her diary, I connected with her on a very personal level. I felt that she was writing directly to me, and she became a dear friend over the course of the pages. Her diary is one of most important and touching books that I have ever read. Being able to visit her house was a privilege that I never imagined.
Photo from lydiamann
It was an extraordinary and surreal experience to walk behind that bookcase. I walked up the stairs, and then I was actually inside the Secret Annex. After the family was betrayed and captured, the Nazis took all the furniture, though left Anne’s diary laying in the debris. Otto Frank requested that the house remain unfurnished, to allow free movement of visitors, and as a reminder of all that was lost in the Holocaust. In Anne’s room, her pictures remain stuck to the wallpaper. The royal family, film stars, figure skaters, her friend’s summer home, and thirteen postcards are all visible. I stuck similar images to my own wall when I was fourteen. There is a postcard of tea-drinking chipanzees, sent to her by her mother in 1937 from England. I stood for a long time in that room. The room in which Anne wrote her diary, confided her dreams and her fears. The windows completely blacked out – no glimpses of sunshine through the cracks. My heart broke for her, and for the millions of others who have lost so much due to war and prejudice. There are photos displayed of what the room may have looked like when Anne was in hiding:
Photo from annefrank.org
There is a book by the exit that lists the names of over 100 000 Dutch Jews who were deported to concentration camps. The name we all search for – Frank, Annelies Marie – appears as a single line in a volume as dense with people as a phone book.
At the bookstore, we bought The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank – six women’s stories who had been in the death camps with her after she was betrayed, and survived to tell their story. One of the women, Janny Bradnes-Brilleslijper, who sought out Otto Frank after the war to tell him that his daughters were dead, ends her story with this message:
I want to repeat, I have told this because I want to make it very clear to a large number of people that all discrimination – whatever form it takes – is evil and the world can go to pieces because of it. Actually, literally, go to pieces. Discrimination against someone because of his skin color or his ears or his hair, or God knows what – we can all die from that. It only takes one person to say, “He isn’t as good as I am, because he has…” You can fill in the rest.
All discrimination deserves moral outrage.
Photo from annefrank.org
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I am really interested in one day going to visit the secret annex. Which I will do eventually before I die. Because Anne Frank was really a great person she inspires me if everyone could see the world like she did. Because how she once said after everything I still think people are good at heart. She was too nice and cared and loved helping others. I first learned about her in the eighth grasde we read her diary in a play form in school as a group and once I read that I had to find out more information of this young girl and her family and the war itself. When people make jokes about jews and stuff infront of me I go in to detail and tell them if it were you then you wouldn’t be joking so don’t make those jokes infront of me because 6 million innocent people didn’t need to die the way they did. That was so horrible when I watched the movie I started crying because it really makes you wonder what if it were you. It could of been. And I beleive one day in the future the holocaust will happen again but maybe not with Jews this time. I pray that it doesn’t happen but you never know.
As a large proportion of intolerance and prejudice is actually perpetuated by the religions themselves, personally I doubt that prayer will help alleviate this problem. All that we can do is identify discrimination when we find it, and then work to end it.
that is very clever to do isint it
On my list of things to do before i die or am too old to, visiting the Anne Frank house is one of them.
Wow, that is amazing! I would really love to go to the secret annex, too. I have been to the secret annex a lot of times in my mind, as i read her diary. She has touched me deeply and everytime I read about the holocaust, it saddens me and I do hope that this will never happen again. To any of us.
This is really cool, i really want to go to amsterdam and go see the secret annix somtime but it will be expencive. I am only 13 so i will have to wait a few years before i can go. This stuff is really interesting and it makes me sad to read a lot of thisstuff about the jews and how they had to live. I really wish i could have met miep. She seemed very nice. My class is reading the play about annes diary in language and its really intersting. In 7th grade i went to washington D.C. and i got to go to the holicost museum and see the stuff that happened during the holicost. when i was there it didnt know much about the holicost and i had never even heard about anne frank but that ihave i would like to go back and see the museum again cuz i rember some of hte stuff and i would like to see it again because i aint guna be alive forever. I found this article very cool and like to know more. I would also love to see annes diary in preson
i think yeah its a good book, but it is unfair that people invade som1s privcy like that, so what if she is dead, i mean just because she is dead we CAN read her diary?!?!? i DONT think so. the dad should of just writen a book on what happened so maybe it wouldnt have been the same but we would have still knowed what was kind of going on. i mean she confided in that diary, she thought it was only true friend, and here WE are reading her private thoughts!
WAT DO U THINK????
Actually, Anne wanted to have her diary published after she heard a speech on the radio stating “”History cannot be written on the basis of official decisions and documents alone. If our descendants are to understand fully what we as a nation have had to endure and overcome during these years, then what we really need are ordinary documents — a diary, letters from a worker in Germany, a collection of sermons given by a parson or priest.” After this, Anne starting editing her diary for publication.
yeah! twicemice rocks!!!!
I really would like to visit the annex and also to visit the mass graves.