Yesterday I took my 2nd pilgrimage to Amsterdam. When I returned it was late and I had a bit of sinus stuff going on, so you must forgive me for not writing then.
At 267 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam, there is a house. It's a simple row house, looking no different from the houses left and right of it. In front, just past the busy little street lies the Prince's Canal. You can see the water flowing from between the trees lines. Little houseboats adorned with flowers are tied along the canal gently bobbing up and down with the motion of the current. It's a house in a simple neighborhood, away from the hustle and bustle of the Van Gogh and Rijksmuseum. A couple of streets over there is an American food store where you can buy Lucky Charms, Reeses, and Mountain Dew, just about anything an American in Holland could ask for. Really, there's nothing special about this part of town, it just like any other street in Amsterdam, but that's the point.
We sometimes forget the streets we tread once lay underfoot of people from a different age, a forgotten age, and that places we live had a life before we stepped
through the door, and will continue to have one after we've left. Yesterday I pictured a little girl about thirteen years old in a warm woolen jacket and matching cap skipping with her mother down the street in front of me off to see her father at his shop.She's a bit of a chatter box. Her mother stopped listening to her prattle a few streets back and walks straight in her hands pressed into her pockets for warmth. The girls has yet to pass a stranger and waves at everyone she meets, down to the little paper boy peddling his bike across the street. On her lapel there is sewn a yellow star with the name
Jood scribbled across the center. Early this morning (68 years ago) she, her parents, and her sister went into her father's shop and never came out.
"For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later neither I, nor anyone else, will care for the outpouring of a thirteen year old schoolgirl."
But people do care. I certainly did back in June when I picked up her Diary in order to thumb through it, and the line of people who wrap around the block of 267 Prinsengracht care as well. Everyone has heard the story of Anne Frank.
Seeing the story of Anne Frank is something I would wish for you all.
The rooms were tiny and so very dark, but I know I can sit here and tell you that until I turn blue in the face and it still won't mean anything. It's important to note that when I say tiny, I mean tiny for eight people (seriously, I was standing there having flashback to a horrible summer spent with three crammed into one bedroom). The
annex as we refer to it today was actually always intended to be an apartment. It wasn't unusual at the time to have a duplex of sorts with accomodations for a business or home in the front of the building and an apartment in the back. Because of this the Franks and Van Pels had the luxury of a water closet with running water and a working kitchen. After hours they would sneak downstairs into the offices and help their father on clerical work for the business or listen to the radio. The difficulty lay in how they lived, crammed into those little rooms during the day, no sunlight, now fresh air, not even a cracked window. Be quiet or else the neighbors will here you! Still, you enter the rooms and there is a sense of
life there. People lived here, they fought and laughed and cried here.
Anne was such a dreamer, a lover of nature and beauty and literature. Her cheerful voice comes shimmering through the pages of her diary unbound by time, uninhibited in her happiness and curiosity.
But here's where my imagination goes.
“I keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would like to be, and what I could be, if … there weren’t any other people living in the world.” This was Anne's last diary entry dates August 1, 1944. Three days later police raided the annex. What was she thinking? How did she cope? Did she cry? What was her father thinking?
Because of the things I've been through and I've seen, I put hefty weight on each and every person having a purpose in life. Sometimes this purpose can be fulfilled long before we ever grow into adulthood, and sometimes this purpose is fulfilled in our passing. Then only true tragedy, I think, is a death that comes before the purpose is fulfilled. This is not the case with Anne. It became increasingly clear to me as I walked through the museum that if Anne had survived there would be no Anne Frank house. Why would there be a need? Today, Anne has not only become the face of 6 million men, women, and children who died during the war, but she is the connecting point of an entire generation that survivors like Eli Wiesel and Corrie Ten Boom miss.
I watched a little girl about ten years old scour this museum. She read every plaque, watched every video, and analyzed every picture and was still there when I left an hour later. I know nothing of that little girl except this. Anne Frank has made a history lover of her, and those who know history and love it do not fall prey to the sins of our forefathers.
"We cannot change what happened anymore. The only thing we can do is to learn from the past and to realize what discrimination and persecution of innocent people means. I believe that it's everyone's responsibility to fight prejudice."- Otto Frank, 1970
"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before beginning to improve the world." Anne Frank,c. 1944
The building is a giant castle that has been built larger and larger over the centuries. It has a little thoroughfare that people use to cut through town and a courtyard. Apparently the lawmakers work all day but every so often they need a break for fresh air, so they simply walk downstairs into the courtyard perhaps get ice cream from the vendor (which by the way is an Italian ice cream vendor) and they walk around the building. It's as simple as that. Oh, and there was one more sight on our little tour.
