Anne Frank was a Jewish girl born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1929. When the Nazis rose to power, her family fled to Amsterdam, but after Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, life grew increasingly dangerous for Jewish families there. In July 1942, when Anne was 13, her family went into hiding in a secret annex behind her father’s office, along with another family and a dentist. For over two years, they lived in cramped, silent hiding, dependent on a few brave helpers who smuggled in food and supplies. During this time, Anne kept a diary, writing about her fears, hopes, and the ordinary struggles of adolescence under extraordinary circumstances. In August 1944, the annex was discovered and everyone in hiding was arrested and deported to concentration camps. Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in early 1945, just weeks before the camp was liberated. Her father, Otto Frank, was the only one of the group to survive the war. He later published her diary, which became one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust, giving a deeply personal voice to its millions of victims.
The Secret Annex was a hidden set of rooms at the back of 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, above and behind the office and warehouse where Anne’s father ran his spice and pectin business. The entrance was concealed behind a movable bookcase, built by one of the helpers to hide the doorway from anyone searching the building. Eight people lived there in total: Anne, her parents Otto and Edith, her sister Margot, the van Pels family (Hermann, Auguste, and their son Peter), and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer. The space was small and was only a few rooms across two floor. They had to stay almost completely silent during business hours since employees worked in the offices below, unaware anyone was hiding above them. Windows stayed covered, and they could only move around freely at night. Four employees of Otto Frank’s company, Miep Gies, Jan Gies, Victor Kugler, and Johannes Kleiman, along with Bep Voskuijl risked their lives to bring food, books, and news for over two years. It was Miep Gies who later found Anne’s diary scattered on the floor after the arrest and kept it safe, unread, until Otto returned. Today the building is preserved as the Anne Frank House museum, and the bookcase entrance still stands as one of its most visited features.
The museum, open since 1960, deliberately keeps the atmosphere quiet and subdued rather than turning the experience into a typical exhibit-heavy museum. You experience the story through quotes, photos, videos, and original items, and the atmosphere throughout is authentic and understated. The rooms themselves are kept mostly bare. The Nazis emptied the annex after the arrest, and Otto Frank chose to leave it unfurnished so visitors could feel the space as it was, rather than see a re-creation. Documents and possessions belonging to the eight people are displayed throughout the annex, and the front of the house has been restored to how it looked in the 1940s. You still walk past personal traces like the movable bookcase entrance, pencil marks on the wall where Anne and Margot’s growth was tracked, and film clippings Anne pasted onto her bedroom wall. Anne’s original diary is also on display. It is a small, cramped, and genuinely moving walk-through with steep old canal-house stairs, narrow rooms, and a hushed, respectful crowd.
This was always top of our list of Amsterdam attractions, so after a canal boat tour, we headed in for our appointed time at the Anne Frank House. Anne Frank’s legacy is invoked across several distinct, and often clashing, contemporary debates right now. Most directly, her story is cited as a warning as antisemitic incidents climb globally, a reminder of where anti-Jewish hatred can lead when it goes unchecked. But abroader “never again” symbol needs to be applied well beyond antisemitism. For decades her name has been extended to other persecuted groups like her as a stand-in for a Syrian refugee girl during the 2016 crisis, and her story has surfaced in U.S. immigration debates too. The Trump administration’s antisemitism envoy argued that Anne Frank was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law, pushing back on the comparison…which is too fucked up to comment on. Some pro-Palestinian activists have used her image to criticize Israeli policy, including a banner depicting Anne Frank at an anti-Israel protest in Leipzig and an artwork depicting her in a keffiyeh. At the same time, defenders of Israel invoke her as a symbol of what happens when the world looks away from Jewish persecution. Historians note this pattern isn’t new since her name has been claimed across the political spectrum going back decades, from the U.S. civil rights movement to boycott campaigns against Israel. Some argue the sheer breadth of appropriation risks implying antisemitism is no longer a matter of concern, diminishing the special message her story bears about antisemitism’s enduringly destructive powers. Others go further, arguing the constant reuse has flattened her into a one-dimensional portrait of “a good person,” reducing a complicated, sometimes prickly teenager to an emblem of forgiveness rather than confronting the brutal reality of what happened to her. There’s no single agreed meaning right now. She functions simultaneously as a specific reminder about antisemitism, a general metaphor for persecuted children anywhere, and a contested symbol for the fight for goodness in our treatment of one another.
It’s been more than eighty years since Anne Frank’s ordeal and still we seem to struggle keeping the lessons of her plight in mind as we, as a people, put politics and self-interest ahead of basic humanity and goodness. I really wonder how people can be aware of such a lesson in atrocity, see analogy in current treatment of others (regardless of religion or race), and simply forget or ignore the lessons. It makes me wonder exactly where Anne Frank would be hiding today? I’m not able to explain it or fix it, but by going to her Annex, at least I can remember and honor it.