Anne Frank House
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re still in Cyprus, where summer is nudging temps up a tiny bit every day.
Anne Frank House
February 18, 2025: the note in my calendar reminded me to buy tickets for the Anne Frank House Museum. We were in Cambodia, surrounded by the ancient remains of the once-mighty Khmer Empire, and the more recent remains of Pol Pot’s genocidal attempt to establish his own ‘Khmer Rouge.’
During a break from Angkor Wat’s midday heat, I went online to book two tickets to a museum we wouldn’t see until six weeks later. (Aside: That’s a relatively frequent reality of living the way we do—I’m often distracted from the amazing thing in front of me by the need to plan for another amazing thing somewhere down the road ahead. It’s a small price to pay, and I try not to let it interfere with my desire to be fully present, where I am.)
By the time I got down to the business of choosing a date and specific time slot for our Anne Frank visit, the only time available on the day I wanted was 6:30 in the evening. I bought the tickets.
On a beautiful evening in early April, Lee and I strolled to the house/museum in central Amsterdam and got in line. It was all very organized—they process huge crowds through the small house all day, every day. Tickets go on sale six weeks ahead of time, and they sell out quickly. The museum is open until 10 pm most days, 361 days per year. It runs at maximum capacity all the time.
It was interesting, but crowded. We all donned headsets for the audio guide, and shuffled along looking at each space, each exhibit, each reminder of the bright flash that was Anne Frank’s short life. It was a bit warm, a bit humid, and very crowded.
The next day, wandering around the city by myself, I made my way to a canal in the center called Nieuwe Keizersgracht. On one bank, a series of silver plaques formed a straight line all the way down the sidewalk, one in front of each building, as far as I could see. On each were the names of all the Jewish residents of that building who had been murdered during the Holocaust, more than 200 hundred people on that one block.
It’s a monument called the Schaduwkade, or Shadow Wall. The residents of the building raised the money and installed the plaques in 2013. The day I was there, no one was paying attention. As a matter of fact, the only person I saw next to the water, where the plaques are, was a scruffy-looking guy urinating at the base of the bridge, about a meter away from the first plaque.
I don’t really know why tourists are drawn to one thing and not another. Why we mark some of humanity’s ills but not others, or why one monument to the Holocaust gets so many visitors, while others are ignored. Obviously, many, many, many of us have read Anne Frank’s diary. We know what she looked like, what her life was like, before she went into hiding and after.
For people interested in learning more about the Holocaust, or honoring the Dutch Jews who died in that horror, there is so much more to see in Amsterdam, other than Anne Frank’s house. I would never discourage anyone from going—on the contrary, it makes her terrible, tragic story more real. But I found the contrast odd—the Anne Frank House museum is so crowded with tourists, while the other Holocaust markers in Amsterdam were so … not crowded.
I realize it’s because having a face to attach to history makes it more comprehensible. We humans struggle to humanize abstract stories and numbers. It’s easier to wrap our brains around one person, or three, than 200. But that doesn’t make any of those 200 murdered residents of Nieuwe Keizersgracht less real.
Take care,
Lisa
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