ANNE FRANK HUIS - HOUSE OF ANNE FRANK

It was here that the Frank family found refuge after fleeing Germany in 1933, and where they lived in total hiding from 1941 onwards, surrounded by a few friends, including the Van Daan couple, who were also threatened with death due to the daily roundups of Jews. The story of this hidden existence, recorded day by day by the young Anne Frank in her deeply moving diary, went round the world and became the symbol of murdered innocence. It came to a tragic end on August 4, 1944, when the Frank family and their eight companions were arrested on anonymous tip-offs and deported to the death camps. Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, and only Otto, the father, survived. It was to commemorate this tragic fate, but also to respond to strong popular pressure, that the house was saved from demolition and remained largely intact, as if frozen on the threshold of an unbridgeable moment of horror.

Open to the public since 1960, the house is divided by an inner courtyard, with the voorhuis at the front and theachterhuis at the back. It was on the^2nd and^3rd floors of theachterhuis that Otto Frank set up his makeshift hideaway, consisting of three rooms and an attic accessed via a revolving bookcase. At night, all the windows were covered with black canvas, a practice imposed on Amstellodammers by the Germans to prevent the Allies from finding their way around. The absolute bareness of the premises reinforces the sense of emptiness and absence of its last occupants. In Anne Frank's room, on the faded tapestries, we can still see a few photographs of film stars cut out from magazines of the time, little windows onto dreams and innocence in a brutal world on the verge of perdition. The Van Daan family lived on the upper floor. A walkway, installed after the war, leads to the front house, home to the Anne Frank Foundation for the fight against racism, which has several rooms containing various documents and photographs on this theme. The young girl's diary is available in several languages. This memorial museum has gained immeasurable importance over the years, and has the longest average queue (in size, not duration, fortunately) of any museum in the Netherlands. A very moving place...