Amsterdam, Netherlands

I went to the Anne Frank House. Not allowed to take pics. I have posted several I found online showing what I saw. It is powerful to touch the bookcase I read about when we read this book in school as a child. You forget and this type of experience makes you remember and understand at some level what happened in Europe not that long ago. To walk up those steep stairs and stand in her tiny room that she shared with others and see the pictures that she glued to the walls is an experience I will not forget.

The Anne Frank House is quite an experience, a well done tasteful, appropriately reserved museum. I found out in 1944 a Dutch politician in exile announced by radio that those in the Netherlands should record their war experience for history after it ended and Anne Frank rewrote her entries based on this. There were many pieces of information like that I did not recall in this museum. I have not read her book since grade school but the pieces of it they display and the quotes from it show a tremendous writing skill for someone who was only a young teen. A skill far beyond her years that spoke of some urgency to do it then and do it well. The writings reveal an almost eery knowledge that what she knew was doing was important work and even though but a young teen it was to be her one chance to be the writer she desired to be.

If you ever get the chance to go see this house. She was but one person who lived in the house and the stories of what happened to all are as important. Her father's unrelenting push to make sure her writings were published is an amazing story of its own. At the end of the tour there is a guest book you can write whatever you want in. It is important to remember this happened only 70 years ago, not even a second ago considering time and it is important to always remember.

You learn visiting places like this that you cannot learn from books and pictures. Next week I'm going to Krakow, Poland. I saw that on the way is Auschwitz - Birkenau Concentration Camp and I will be going there. Anne Frank was taken there on September 3, 1944. I have been to Dachau and have since thought I didn't need to visit another place like it however I think if travel and see things like this when so few do it is important to do so and talk about it.Read more