From the Prinsengracht this looks like an ordinary canal house. Behind its front, in rooms built onto the back of a working business, seven people went into hiding in July 1942. An eighth joined them that November, and they stayed there until August 1944. Anne Frank was thirteen when she went in. She wrote through the whole two years — about the others, about the war, about wanting to be a writer — and rewrote her own diary near the end with publication in mind. On 4 August 1944 the police came to the building and took everyone in the annexe. Why they came has never been established, and the house's own researchers say so; the betrayal that everyone assumes has never been proved.
The annexe is entered the way it was, through the doorway hidden behind a hinged bookcase. Otto Frank, the only one of the eight to survive, asked that the rooms be left unfurnished after the Germans emptied them, and they still are. What remains is what was fixed to the walls: film-star pictures Anne glued up, pencil marks measuring two girls' height, blackout paper on the windows. Downstairs, in a case, is the red-checked diary.