- Person
- Anne Frank
- Lived
- 1929–1945
- Field
- Writing
- From
- Dutch-German
The story
In December 1940 Otto Frank moved the offices of his businesses, Opekta and Pectacon, to Prinsengracht 263, a seventeenth-century canal house in central Amsterdam. Its rear extension, hidden from view by the houses around it, became the Secret Annex, where Anne, her parents, her sister Margot and four other Jews hid for two years and one month until they were arrested in August 1944. Only Otto survived the camps.
After the diary was published in 1947, Otto's former employees began showing visitors the hidden rooms. But by 1955 the building had been bought by a company that planned to demolish the row and rebuild. A Dutch newspaper, Het Vrije Volk, started a campaign to save it on 23 November 1955, and protesters gathered outside on the day set for demolition. On 3 May 1957 a group of Dutch citizens, including Otto Frank, set up the Anne Frank Foundation to buy and restore the building and open it to the public. That October the owner donated it to the foundation, which used the funds it had raised to buy the neighbouring house at number 265.
The Anne Frank House opened exactly three years after the foundation was formed, on 3 May 1960. The warehouse, offices and annex were deliberately left unfurnished, so visitors could move freely through the rooms and picture the lives once lived there. More than 9,000 people came in the first year, and the number doubled within a decade.
As interest grew, the museum expanded into neighbouring buildings, linked by a walkway from the room that had belonged to Peter van Pels. These now house the diary itself, exhibitions on the life and times of Anne Frank and displays on persecution and discrimination in the world today. In 2007 Anne's cousin Buddy Elias donated some 25,000 family documents, including photographs and Otto Frank's 1945 letter telling his mother that his wife and daughters had died.
Today the house is one of Amsterdam's main attractions, receiving about 1.27 million visitors in 2017, when it was the third most visited museum in the Netherlands. Its website, launched in 2004 in six languages, and its virtual tours bring the annex to people who cannot travel to see it.
Why it matters
The Anne Frank House lets visitors from around the world stand where Anne wrote, turning history into a personal lesson about prejudice and its consequences.
About Anne Frank
Diarist of the Holocaust; her diary has become one of literature's most-read accounts of conscience and hope.
More about Anne Frank
- Anne Frank rewrote her diary to publish it after the warAfter hearing a 1944 radio appeal to preserve wartime diaries, Anne Frank, aged 14, began rewriting her diary as a book, creating pseudonyms and shaping it for readers.
- Anne Frank's diary encouraged Nelson Mandela in prisonNelson Mandela said he read Anne Frank's diary while in prison and "derived much encouragement from it" in his struggle against apartheid.
- Anne Frank's birthplace opened a centre for learningIn 1997 the Anne Frank Educational Centre opened in Frankfurt's Dornbusch district, where Anne lived until 1934, as a place to learn about National Socialism and its lessons today.
- Saplings from Anne Frank's tree grow around the worldSaplings from the horse-chestnut tree Anne Frank watched from her hiding place have been planted at museums, schools and memorials, including Little Rock and a 9/11 memorial park.
Sources
- Anne Frank Wikipedia
- Anne Frank House Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.