The Anne Frank House

We started off this morning by taking the tram to the Anne Frank House. This is the house where her family and another spent most of World War II in hiding. For those of you who’ve read her diary, the place where they were hiding is actually bigger than I pictured it, but it is still very small. Hard to believe 8 people could fit in this area. When you tour the house, you start on the bottom floors, which was Mr. Frank’s jam factory. Now think about this, most of the houses in Amsterdam are either three or six meters across in the front (about 9 to 18 feet). This house is 18 feet wide, but is probably twice as deep. The stairs between floors is incredibly steep and narrow. Now imagine that this building was used as a manufacturing facility. In fact, some of the buildings in Amsterdam today are used as warehouses. It’s amazing when you think of our big manufacturing facilities.

Anyway, back to the Anne Frank house. After you go through the manufacturing area, offices and storerooms, you eventually get to the landing with the moveable bookcase. This bookcase concealed the entrance to the secret annex. You climb a very narrow, steep set of stairs (picture stairs in old houses in the Midwest going up to the attic), and then you enter the annex area. This consists of five small rooms. While I envisioned it even smaller, I can’t imagine living with eight people for several years in a space that small! The last part of the exhibit shows where each of them went after they were found. As everyone knows, only Otto Frank survived Auschwitz.

After touring the house, it’s hard to know what else to write about it, other than to describe it like I did above. I have a hard time getting my head around it. The house was built in 1635, and the rear annex (where they lived) was rebuilt in 1739. It served many purposes (including as a horse stable), and then in 1940, purchased by Frank Otto. Living in a 400 year old home, being confined to 500 sq ft with 8 people for a period of 2 years, knowing if you were found, you would most likely be killed. It’s simply something that many of us from the United States can’t fathom, from the age of the home, to having our freedom removed, to facing death if you’re found.

Later in the day we went to the Rijksmuseum. This is another art museum, including many famous Rembrandt paintings. I think I talked enough about art yesterday, so I’ll only include the uninformed opinion that Rembrandt is a much better painter than Van Gogh. I make this statement simply because Rembrandt uses more colors and seems to do a better job of coloring within the lines. In all seriousness, even I was able to get that he was famous for his ability to use a technique to make light appear to come from the painting, and in some cases was actually able to even understand what story he was trying to share!

Now that I’ve offended all the art people reading this, I’ll quickly run through the rest of our day. We still had time before we had to head to the airport, so we tried to find old churches. For church services in the morning, we went to the English Reformed Church. The building was actually in a small courtyard off the streets. You entered the courtyard through an arched doorway off a small square. This entered into an open courtyard, with a beautiful small church in the middle. The church was built and held it’s first service in 1607. The building was beautiful inside as well. Sorry, no pictures as they were not allowed to be taken inside the building. Here’s the website with more info about the church http://home.tiscali.nl/~t451501/ercadam/content/building.htm. You can download a pdf file with detailed info if you’re interested.

I guess no trip to Amsterdam is complete without at least one story of going completely the wrong direction. We were looking for other old churches that we could go inside, as several people had told us they were all open for viewing. On our map was one called “The Old Church.” We found one that we thought was it, but it wasn’t open, so we started down the street looking down side streets for others. We finally saw one and sure enough, it was the Old Church. Unfortunately, we couldn’t go in due to an organ concert in progress, so you’ll have to enjoy it with me on the internet at the following link http://www.oudekerk.nl/. It was built in the 1300’s, and was currently under renovation.

I tried to take pictures, but don’t think they’ll be very good as you couldn’t stand far enough away from the church to get a good picture. The city of Amsterdam (in the 1600’s) began to build up around the church, so the nearby buildings are very close. Unfortunately, they are also now the edge of the red-light district. The front door to the church is directly across from, and less than 50 feet from the Prostitute Information Center, the sign for which is displayed prominently out front of the building. There are a variety of other creative venues all around the church, including multiple coffee houses. In Amsterdam, coffee houses do not sell coffee, but a wide variety of “soft” drugs. Amsterdam is unfortunately very permissive in what they allow, and you can smell and see it all (even if you don’t choose to) in that area of the city. We chose to depart the Old Church, but decided not to walk back the way we came in, resulting in all of us spending a lot of time looking at the sidewalk until we came back to the main street again. The area is not well marked, so there were families with children also walking in the area. It’s really kind of sad to have so large an area of a beautiful city with such activity prominently displayed.

OK. Enough for today. Back to the airport and the red-eye flight to Dubai. More to follow tomorrow!