In November I went to Amsterdam. I went with my sister and because – and only because – of her, we went to Anne Frank’s house.
I wasn’t at all sure about that. For one thing, I’m not a museum sort of person. I’m just not. For another, I wasn’t at all convinced about the balance between tourism and Holocaust memorial – where exactly is the point between learning from history and just being ghoulish? I’d already done one ghoulish death tourism trip that month (that was to Chernobyl) and I didn’t really like the feel of going to Anne’s house.
But since it was an inevitability – I’d handed over my own debit card to pay for both tickets – I figured I might as well re-read the Diary. I bought it with the proceeds of some prize or other when I was in junior school. I remember winning the Governors’ Prize and buying books with it but I also have a dim memory of writing that fact inside the front cover. Then again, I can’t remember winning any other prize. But yes, I bought the Diary of Anne Frank with some school prize money and I don’t think I’ve opened it since then.
Once I’d started reading it, I started to get into the whole thing. Once I’d read a few chapters, I did want to go and see the house where it all happened. My twenty-plus year old memory of the book was of the entire family squished between a bookcase and a wall and now I rediscovered that there was in fact an entire (relatively spacious, actually!) apartment hidden behind a bookcase which acted as a false front door.
One thing I discovered was that Anne wanted her diary to be published, which I was quite glad about, because otherwise I would have felt a certain amount of discomfort in reading someone’s diary, even if it was published more than seventy years ago. Not only did she want it to be republished, she rewrote it with publication in mind. What you’re reading is not her original diary. It’s a mix of her original diary, her rewritten planned-to-be-published diary, the novelisation of the diary (for lack of any better way to phrase it) and an assortment of her other written work. Plus a hefty dose of censorship from her father.
In March 1944, she heard on the radio that the Dutch government wanted people to keep diaries, letters and any other personal documents so that later they could create a picture of the people’s suffering and what life was really like during the war. That was the point at which the plan formed and the rewriting started. In fact, the original diary was in three notebooks, the second of which has never been found. The reason 1943 appears in the diary at all is that the rewritten-for-publication version did survive.
Among other things, I saw Anne’s diaries in her house. The original diary is a bit of a scribbled mess – I don’t envy the person who had to transcribe that later on. But the rest of the writing is actually startlingly neat, neat enough for my sister to exclaim “Wow, she had such nice handwriting!”
The other thing that I didn’t know was simply what language she wrote in. The Franks were a German family. Anne was born in Frankfurt. But in the early 30s, when things first started to go wrong, they moved to Amsterdam. Later on, the dentist moved into the secret annexe and they gave him a Welcome to the Achterhuis sheet, including the instruction “Any civilised language may be used here – so no German!”, from which I take it the diary is written in Dutch.
And while I’m talking about Anne Frank, let’s talk about her house.
The house is the fourth one along from the church here – at least, it is now. The entire block from the end to her house is all the museum, so you can have the admin and the shop and the cafe and all that without any of it intruding on the house itself. It’s the one with the black double doors on the other side of the canal here – two big modern houses and then a traditional house and then Anne’s house.
The house was actually her dad’s office, so the front part of the house was warehousing and offices and the non-Jewish staff there helped hide, protect and supply the Franks, plus the family of one of the Jewish employees plus a dentist they randomly invited in because they had the room to save one more person.
You take an audioguide, point it at a flag on the pickup point to tell it what language you want it to speak in and then carry it around the museum. In the museum and then non-secret parts of the house there are listening points – point your audioguide somewhere near the point and it’ll beep to let you know it’s picking up the new audio. Often, it does it automatically as you walk into a room. Somehow, despite everyone walking in and scanning at a different time, all the guides are in sync with each other and with video displays. It’s magic.
Once you go behind the bookcase and into the secret annexe, not visible from the street, there is no more audioguide. And for some reason, perhaps just because it feels appropriate, people go through more or less in silence, all following each other in a long slow line around the edges of the rooms where they can look at the remains – all Anne’s pictures on the walls, the pencil marks measuring how they grew while they were in there, the stove and the sink etc. Actually, that’s about all there is to look at. The Dutch SS emptied the place after the inhabitants were discovered and Otto Frank, Anne’s father, preferred it not to be refurnished later.
It’s not a bad size. Eight people lived in what was basically three rooms. Anne’s parents and sister shared a room, Anne shared with the dentist and the van Pels lived upstairs in the room which was used as living room and kitchen during the day. Peter van Pels lived under the ladder to the attic, where they kept their food supplies. Anne’s diary talks about her going up there to fetch potatoes pretty much every single day and later on, deliberately lingering in Peter’s space.
If you could ever leave the annexe, it’s not a bad space, anyway. For eight people to never ever leave for over two years, it’s a pretty small space but not as small as the gap behind the bookcase that I’d been imagining. That said, they did leave the annexe. When no one was at work, they crept out and sat in the office or went up in the more public attic and looked out at the treetops. Someone crept all the way down to the front door to bolt it every single night. Not that it exactly counts as freedom.
These days it’s dark inside the secret annexe, presumably in the interest of minimising the light fading anything. But when the Franks lived there, it was light. Anne says of the van Pels’ room something along the lines of “You wouldn’t believe such a light and airy room could be hidden up there”. Following the photo tour on the official Anne Frank Museum website, where they appear to have temporarily reconstructed living conditions, it’s bright and light and packed with furniture.
You’re not allowed to take any photos in the museum at all. Even in the secret annexe there’s staff lurking, waiting to slip over and murmur “No photos, sir. No photos at all” to the most discrete of phone-using photographers. They can just feel it.
Oh, and the bookcase that hid the secret door to the secret annexe? That was initially installed because the Nazis were going round looking for illegal bicycles. Jews were not allowed to ride bikes (or travel on the tram or be out after 8pm and a whole lot of other things) before they were rounded up and no one wanted Nazis hunting for illegal bikes to accidentally find illegal Jews.
Once you descend from Peter’s space, you go through a tunnel that feels pretty space-age and you’re back into the houses next door, back into the museum and the audioguide wakes up again. This is where some of Anne’s actual writing is displayed, her diaries, her manuscripts and some of her school books.
As I write this, I’ve nearly finished reading the Diary. I’m in June 1944, I’ve reached D Day and I know that this part of her story ends in August 1944. Of course, Anne’s story doesn’t finish there. The next part of her story finishes in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. But her story carries on. She’s a symbol of the Holocaust, she’s a legend – and it’s actually quite jarring to read the Diary because in real life, she was a pretty irritating teenager! She’s Ranger-age, she’s self-obsessed and boy-crazy, her mum just doesn’t understaaaand her, why is everyone so mean to her, does Peter like her and so on. And that’s the point of Anne Frank – she was an ordinary child in a hellish situation who happened to write a diary that happened to survive and be published.
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