Anne Frank Huis
I was surprised how little seeing it moved me—especially compared to the riveting documentary I’d seen several years ago that cobbled interviews with surviving friends and Dutch enablers with historical footage and photographs:
Anne Frank Remembered. The “secret annex” behind the foodstuff company that Otto Frank managed seems an unlikely place to hide. The annex itself is a major wing behind the principal building, which, with its surrounding green space, would have been noticeable to neighboring houses, especially with the blackout window coverings continually drawn. Even with a hinged bookcase covering the only access, anyone understanding the building layout would have been suspicious. If neighbors didn’t notice members of the two families occupying the annex—in some inevitably less cautious moments—the warehouse workers below the annex surely would have heard them. Their hiding behind the working office that Otto formerly managed strikes me as too naïve, given that they had foreknowledge of the extermination camps already processing humans in Poland.
With her photos of period movie stars, like Ray Milland, adorning walls of the bare but not unreasonably tiny bedroom, Anne seems almost like a normal teenager. Her dream of becoming a writer must have seemed just that, until it was her life’s jeopardy that became her subject. When I consider that the two families hid here for over two years without once going outside—just peeking occasionally out toward the scenic Prinsengracht, and listening, regularly, to the toll of bells (of time passing) from the nearby Westerkerk—I get a sense of their unbearable claustrophobia. Writing daily in her journal provided Anne, quite literally, with oxygen. When betrayal came, it may have seemed initially like relief.
Under the glass cabinet in one of the offices, I could view an actual star that Jews were forced to wear. There was also an original letter from the interior department requiring that Anne’s sister report for internment. These had a chilling effect upon me because they did not feel in any way like historical artifacts. That evening I walked along the narrow, curving street, Zeedijk, surviving from medieval times, toward Nieuw Markt, a broad square dominated by the massive, hulking Waag, the building once used to weigh merchants’ grain for sale, the square only 50 years ago used by the Nazis as the holding pen for Amsterdam’s Jews, prior to their shipment as human cargo east to the internment camps in Germany, and from there to the extermination camps in Poland. All but Otto of the Frank family died in these camps only a couple months before the end of the war, having hid successfully for over two years in the annex along the scenic canal.
Above the ominous Waag, and then, as I walked farther, above the lovely Amstel River, the half moon hung, installed, on such a warm early-autumn evening, exactly the color of parchment, the color the jolly Amsterdam bruin bars are painted (or just stained by years of cigarette smoke), or perhaps the color of lampshades I heard that people—so disassociated from their own humanity—once manufactured as novelties out of human skin.
[Sorry, but this last entry is no scenic travelogue. From the preceding I extract this moral: we need to be vigilant in order to safeguard precious civil rights, in the all-too-simplified wake of the terrible events of September 11, 2001.]
posted by Paul at 1:19 PM
