By Cindy Brzostowski, to Museum Spotlight Europe (June 2023)
In June 1942, Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old schoolgirl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing.”
Decades later, in 2019, roughly 1.3 million visitors were welcomed by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam to see the Secret Annex where she and her family hid for over two years during World War II and Anne’s original diary, which continues to captivate the world.
The thought of another soul reading their diary might just be a teenage girl’s worst nightmare, but in Anne Frank’s case, that was probably a far-fetched idea. Her poignant diary has since been translated into 70 languages and sold over 30 million copies, and its popularity has helped the Anne Frank House become one of the most visited attractions in Amsterdam, a city with many renowned museums, including the Van Gogh Museum and Rijksmuseum. The Anne Frank House is arguably the most well-known World War II hiding place, of which there were countless across Europe. According to the museum, there were between 300,000 and 330,000 people in hiding in the Netherlands alone during the war.
As a place that became famous for the secrecy it afforded, it’s ironic that now you can locate the museum without even being familiar with its facade—just look for the ever-present, large group of people huddled out front, taking photos and queuing up to enter its doors. Due to the museum’s popularity, a visit to the Anne Frank House starts with booking a ticket online well in advance. There’s no option to buy tickets at the door, and you have to choose a specific date and time slot—no rescheduling or refunds allowed. Ticket sales open every Tuesday at 10 am for visits six weeks ahead of time, and they do sell out fast, especially during peak tourist season and weekends.
Purchasing that ticket is the first step of many that keeps things orderly at a museum with such a high volume of visitors. When you arrive during your time slot, your ticket is scanned at the door and your coats and large items must be left at the coat check, as only small bags are allowed inside. Be sure to pick up a free audio tour, which is available in nine different languages. From there, you’re guided on a one-way path through the building and annex, and you’re able to scan numbers in the rooms to hear more about the environments, documents, and objects that you come across.
Each audio explanation is just long enough to give a thorough overview of what you’re seeing or where you’re standing without wearing out the visitor, and while each room can be full of people, it never feels overcrowded. Personal audio guides paired with a no photo or video rule, lend to a quiet atmosphere that’s fitting for the subject matter. Even so, there’s a noticeable shift towards even more solemnity when the tour brings you from the main house to the annex itself through the original, three-shelf bookcase that hid its entrance.
Interestingly, there is no furniture in the former hiding place, and this comes from the choice of Anne’s father, Otto Frank. In a 1962 interview with the Dutch newspaper Het Vrije Volk, Otto Frank said, “After the Anne Frank House had been restored, they asked me if I wanted to have the rooms refurnished. But I said, ‘No. They took everything out during the war, and I want to keep it that way.” You can, however, see a fully furnished scale model of the annex in the final exhibit rooms before the gift shop.
Even without any furnishings, visitors can infer what life was like for Anne Frank and those she lived with. The size of the rooms, the creakiness of the floors, the blackout screens on the windows—all of it makes the visitor distinctly aware of how difficult it would be for someone to hide there, let alone a preteen girl bursting with hopes and dreams.
Once the tour through the annex is complete, visitors reach the so-called Diary Room where you can expect a bit of a line and wait to reach your position in front of the display case with Anne Frank’s red checkered diary. Life had changed greatly for Anne from when she first went into hiding in 1942 to 1944. Just five months before her family’s arrest, she had started rewriting her diary upon hearing the Dutch minister urge people to keep their records of the German occupation. These loose sheets of rewrites are also on display along with a book where she scribbled her favorite quotes and another book of her short stories.
Despite this new possibility of her diary being read and her interest in being published, Anne reminds us that the young girl who walked into the annex—however much she had since heard, seen, and grown during her time in hiding—is not some distant memory. In April 1944, she wrote in her diary,
“Everything here is so mixed up, nothing’s connected any more, and sometimes I very much doubt whether in the future anyone will be interested in all my tosh. ‘The unbosomings of an ugly duckling’ will be the title of all this nonsense. My diary really won’t be of much use to Messrs. Bolkestein or Gerbrandy (members of Dutch cabinet, ed.).”
It’s a feeling any aspiring author can relate to, or really any teenager—does anyone care about this but me? The crowds huddled around that one display case provide closure to Anne’s answer.
We all know the temptation of flipping through another’s diary, and even if the thoughts inside are no longer secret, there’s still an urge to hold Anne’s diary in your own two hands and feel the pages that she wrote on with your own fingertips. For good reason this is not allowed, and the diary sits protected under glass flipped open to the pages of the museum’s choosing. A fitting end with the diary being what brings so many people here in the first place.
But you don’t have to say goodbye to Anne’s story when you leave the house. The museum has done a fantastic job with its supplementary material, particularly a gripping online video series that uses actors in a video diary version of Anne’s words. All fifteen episodes, each only five to ten minutes along, are available to watch for free on YouTube. While the beauty of Anne Frank’s story is that it continues to appeal to teenagers of today, these videos where “Anne” records herself and the annex make it even more relatable with our current reality of TikTok videos and live streaming. It’s one of many smart moves that the Anne Frank House has made, and presumably will continue to make, to keep this history relevant and engaging for people all over the world.
Cover Photo by Rosa Krastel collection of Anne Frank Stichting, Amsterdam
