Visited the Anne Frank House

After my meetings today I went to the Anne Frank House which is not far from my hotel here in Amsterdam. I have never read the book but I basically knew the story. In short, Anne Frank was a Jewish girl living in Germany in the 1930s. Her family emigrated to Holland in 1933 because of the anti-semitic sentiment that was growing in Germany, but by 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Holland she and her family had to go into hiding in a building owned by her father's company. During this time she kept her famous diary. Somebody eventually told the SS about their hiding place and she was arrested along with the others hiding there in 1944. She died in Auschwitz at not quite 16 years old.

It was a very moving experience. It was eerie to think about the fact that I was climbing the same stairs that the Nazi soldiers climbed to arrest the family. The walls still had pictures of Hollywood stars that Anne had put up to make her living arrangements a little more pleasant.

I will definitely read the book now that I have been there. There was no photography allowed inside the museum but I took these pictures outside.



At the end there was an extremely goofy exhibit called Free2choose which was supposedly a look at the injustices of the world today, but it was really just a vapid, politically correct list of supposed injustices while ignoring the obvious ones that are truly comparable to the Nazism that the museum exhibited. I couldn't help but recall something that Dennis Prager said on the radio a few days ago - something to the effect that Europe is really good at recognizing past evils but not so good at recognizing the current evils. For more info on that, read this.


Another place I'm hoping to visit while I'm here is "The Hiding Place" museum where Corrie Ten Boom and her family were arrested for hiding Jews in a hidden room in their house which was also their watch shop. That book I have read, and I also re-read a good chunk of it during the flight here. It's really an excellent book. I would like to think that I would have the courage that her family had during WWII. They were true heroes.