The Anne Frank House

I needed to do a separate post to cover the Anne Frank House because it was an all-encompassing, emotional experience and I didn't want to cloud my retelling of it with my remarks on the rest of my day and my usual amounts of sarcasm and sass. I did a similarly straightforward post when I visited Robben Island/Nelson Mandela's prison cell last year. With that being said, some humor might accidentally find its way into this post, I won't make any promises like that. Another thing about this post is that there won't be any pictures; photos are not allowed in the museum, but I don't think I would have wanted to take any even if they were.

Since DeSales did The Diary of Anne Frank back in March, a good part of the past year of my life has been spent talking about it and making the occasional inappropriate joke about it, so when I woke up this morning, there was definitely the nervous anticipation of actually being there and seeing the things that she wrote about.

When you get in line, you are able to pick up a guide that lays out the museum/house and its history for you. The first thing that struck me was that the cover read "Anne Frank House: A museum with a story." I guess that all museums have a "story" but this museum is the story because this is where Anne Frank lived and what wrote about.

I'll skip over describing my time in line, mostly because I mentioned it in my last post, but also because it is absolutely inconsequential to the overall experience I had there today.

I'll give you a general layout of the museum:
You start out in the welcome center before traveling through the warehouse that was beneath the annex, up the stairs to the office space, through the movable bookcase, then into the actual hiding space before exiting back into the museum where you are able to see some more artifacts, including Anne's diary and pages of loose leaf paper, and exhibitions.

We paused in the warehouse and offices to watch a few informative videos and interviews, but moved through them rather quickly. The office space included scale replicas of what the Annex had looked like when they were hiding there -- after they had been betrayed, the Annex was emptied of all of its remaining contents and when it was turned into a museum, Otto Frank insisted that it remain empty to symbolize the void left behind by the millions of people who were deported and never returned.

We came to the moveable bookcase next. This was something that a lot of people seemed to rush by, but it was one of the things I had been the most interested in seeing, because that bookcase made all the difference. For 25 months, it was all that separated them and the rest of the world, it was so small and yet so large. The original books remained, although they weren't exactly books, more like magazine boxes. And then it was up into the Annex...

I don't think that there has ever been more to see in a collection of empty rooms; just the smallest fraction of the time they'd spent there remained and yet it all needed to be seen. I could describe each room for you, but you can go online and read about that/look at pictures, and I would like to write about what the things you can't ever know until you're actually there.

Whitney and I were both surprised by how large it actually was. It still wasn't much, but we'd expected more cramped quarters -- although 25 months without leaving will undoubtedly make a space even more claustrophobic than it naturally is. It was also really cold up there and the floors creaked with every step, so you could start to get the tiniest sliver of a sense of what it must have been like to actually live there.

You couldn't go up the ladder into Peter van Pels' room in the attic (something that The Fault in our Stars movie gets wrong... plus the whole idea of making out in the Anne Frank House) but they have it set up so that you can actually look into a mirror and see the room. You can see the window where Anne and Peter would get their glimpse of freedom and it was just so crazy because that was all they really had.

After that, we moved on through the exhibits. Although we saw pages that Anne Frank had written, her famous red-checkered diary wasn't actually on display today.

Before we exited, we were able to go through the exhibition space, which where the temporary exhibitions live. The exhibition on display today was a film of different people, mostly authors and actors, but also politicians, friends of the Franks and visitors to the museum described what Anne Frank meant to them. They had walls enclosing the normally open space, and after they played a clip, the quote would be projected onto one of the walls, so you were just surrounded by the epic-ness and just how many people Anne Frank has reached. And yes, John Green was included in this exhibition, reading a portion of The Fault in Our Stars but not the make out portion.

While each one of the clips was interesting, several stood out to me:
The first came from author, Nathan Englander, who wrote a story called "The Anne Frank Game." He described growing up with his sister and said "We would really wonder as Jewish kids in suburbia, who would hide us, if a second holocaust came." This concept isn't foreign to me -- it's a little too close to home, in fact -- but we were in this room and suddenly, what felt like a private thought was revealed to be a universal feeling.

The next was from Nelson Mandela, who said "Some of us read Anne Frank's diary on Robben Island and derived much encouragement from it." When I visited Robben Island last year, I was able to speak with a former prisoner and I heard about how much the prisoners there valued knowledge and books and the immense effort it took for them to obtain them, so the idea that this was one of the books that they chose to read was incredible.

The last clip in the movie was Emma Thompson reading and she simply said "All her would-haves are our opportunities."