Remembering Anne

The rooms themselves are bare, as her father decreed. Bare, but not empty, for every corner of Anne Frank8217;s house in Amsterdam is filled with a terrible...

The rooms themselves are bare, as her father decreed. Bare, but not empty, for every corner of Anne Frank8217;s house in Amsterdam is filled with a terrible, heavy, sadness. At the fate of a girl, of a family, of a people. You want to feel some hope, some sense of uplift at the heroic story, but nothing 8212; not even the pealing bells from the Westerkirk next door, the same bells that marked the slow passage of time for the young girl and her family and friends 8212; can lift the sadness.

The story is familiar: the Franks fled to Amsterdam in 8217;33 to escape Hitler, and went into hiding in July 1942, when the tyranny spread over to Holland with the Nazi occupation. The Frank family lived there, in a secret annexe at the rear of Otto Frank8217;s office and warehouse, helped by three trusted office staff. Until they were betrayed in August 1944 and deported to the camps. All except Otto Frank died; Anne died, aged 16, a month before the war ended.

Walking through the house, even in the company of hundreds of other tourists on a sweltering summer afternoon, one feels a chill. The house was stripped of furniture on Otto Frank8217;s orders but there is enough in the display cases to evoke the terror that they lived in, and enough on the walls to show just how they tried to cope with that terror.

As you walk through the rooms 8212; floorboards creaking at the lightest step 8212; you pass through the bookcase that was used to block the annexe hideaway; you see the corridor that became one person8217;s living space, the room that doubled up as another family8217;s winter days when heating was forbidden, as was movement, and there was little food to sustain body warmth.

You can cope with all that even if, like this writer, you have spent the past month in Germany where nationalism is growing again. But even the sternest of hearts will melt at seeing the pencil marks on the wall recording the girls8217; growth; alongside is the map of Europe with Otto8217;s red pins marking the Allies8217; progress. Or Otto8217;s struggle to retain a semblance of normalcy by reading Dickens Sketches by Boz in the original, with the help of a dictionary.

Eventually we stumble out on the street, grateful for the warmth of afternoon. Finally there is some relief; the bells of Westerkirk peal again, and this time it is some sort of coda to alleviate the somber notes that have played out all this while.