Anne Frank House, Amsterdam

During the German occupation, Anne Frank goes into hiding with her family and four others in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam. In 1944 they are discovered and Anne eventually dies in a concentration camp. Her diary was published after the war and became one of the most widely read books in the world. In this way, Anne Frank gives a face to the victims of the Holocaust.

Anne Frank was born in 1929 into a Jewish family in the German city of Frankfurt am Main. After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled the growing anti-Semitism to Amsterdam. Between 1933 and 1937, about 140,000 Jews fled Germany, of whom about 35,000 ended up in the Netherlands for a shorter or longer period of time. The Frank family gets a home in Amsterdam's Rivierenbuurt. They hid there for over 2 years in the Annex area of the house above the warehouse until they were finally found by the Nazis.

 In total, more than one hundred thousand Dutch Jews are murdered in the various concentration and extermination camps. Compared to the rest of Europe, a relatively large number of Jews were deported in the Netherlands. Between 1933 and 1945, about six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of other persecuted people – including Sinti and Roma, the disabled, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses – were killed by Nazi terror.

The museum was a tribute to Anne's and her family's life, time in the Annex, as well as Anne's diary left to Otto her father who eventually got it published. It is now one of the most widely read books in the world.

At the end of the museum, a video of people saying a few words about Anne Frank played. One young lady recounted that Anne Frank saved her life. She lived through the war in Yugoslavia in the early 90s and she kept a diary to help her process the atrocities she witnessed. Having been through Bosnia and Herzegovina recently, that hit home for us.

Appologies for the photos being a bit blurry I wasn't supposed to take any! 🙃Lue lisää