Anne Frank House

Museum · Western Canal RingAmsterdam,Netherlands

An ordinary Amsterdam canal house whose rear annexe hid eight people for two years, left unfurnished since the arrest, with Anne's diary downstairs.

The Anne Frank House looks like an ordinary canal house from the Prinsengracht, and that is the point: you were meant to walk past it. Behind the front, in rooms built onto the back of a working business, eight people hid for just over two years. Anne Frank was thirteen when she went in, and she wrote through the whole of it. On 4 August 1944 the police came to the building and took everyone in the annexe. You enter the annexe the way it was entered, through the doorway behind a hinged bookcase. The rooms are unfurnished: the Germans emptied them, and Otto Frank, the only one of the eight to survive, asked that they be left that way. What is left 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. Why the police came that day has never been established, and the house's own researchers say so.

Worth knowing

HistoryWho went in, and when

Seven people went into hiding in July 1942 and an eighth joined them that November. They were there until the arrest, two years and one month later.

Good to know

Tickets are online only and tied to a time slot — nothing is sold at the door, and the whole day's supply goes on sale in one batch six weeks beforehand.
Inside, people move through in a slow single file — the annexe rooms take about twenty minutes to walk, and the instinct to hurry with the line is worth resisting.
Read a few pages before you come — the rooms are deliberately empty, so almost everything you bring to them you have to bring with you.
It is not a photograph — cameras are not allowed anywhere in the museum, and the silence people keep in there is voluntary rather than enforced.
The bookcase is the original idea, not a reconstruction — the helpers built the hinged shelf to cover a doorway that already existed, and you step through that same doorway, past its glass.

Things to do

1
Go through the bookcase
The stair behind it is steep and turns sharply, and the doorway is low enough that most adults duck. The change of air between the front house and the annexe is the thing people notice — it is darker, closer and quieter, and it happens in three steps.
2
Find the pencil marks
On the wallpaper of the room Anne's parents shared with Margot are the pencil marks recording the two girls' height over two years. It is the most ordinary object in the building and the one most people stop at longest, because it is the only place where time is visibly passing.
3
Stand at the diary
The red-checked notebook she was given for her thirteenth birthday is shown in the last rooms, in a case built to keep light, vibration and damp off it. Beside it are the school exercise books she carried on in when the first one filled, and the loose sheets of the version she was rewriting for publication. It is the smallest thing in the building and the reason for all of it.