Anne Frank House

I walked along a canal to The Anne Frankhuis. As I entered the secret annex where she and her family, with four others had lived, I knew that there was no language I could use to describe how I felt. The walls in the exhibition were covered in quotes from Anne’s diary. She wanted to be a journalist. She wanted to bring life into the world. And she was so very full of life, almost to to the point of excess. At the end of the tour, there was a quote on the wall by Primo Levi: “One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did, but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better than way. If we were capable of facing the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live”

Primo Levi put into words what I was feeling. It is unbearable to walk through the annex and realize that Anne was not the only one. If each person who ever suffered in the Holocaust, or Darfur, or Rwanda left a record like Anne’s, it would be impossible, as Levi says, “to live.”

Addendum 2-15-07
I do not know why I keep coming back to this post. I Read an article in the New York Times today: "In Old Files, Fading Hopes of Anne Frank's Family." About 70 pages of documents have been found, showign Otto Frank's attempts to escape anywhere. America would not give out visas.

After the Anne Frankhuis, I walked across town, along the same canal to the Dutch Resistance Museum. There was a special exhibit in the first room or paintings done by a father and son while they were in hiding. They did not survive, but their sister and mother did. After the war, the sister and mother went to their hiding place and the pictures were underneath floorboards in the attic. Before the war, the father had not been focused on arts, but his time in hiding and danger brought out his desire to paint and reflect the world around him. His son had painted before, but in hiding began to write poetry.

They were friends with the Franks, and the mother married Otto Frank some years after the war.

Emma Coultrap-Bagg
December 20, 2006