Anne Frank House Netherlands

Legendary

Visit the home where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis until they were captured and sent to concentration camps.

Photo by Dennis Jarvis

On the morning of August 4, 1944, Nazi police raided a canal house at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. Behind a hinged bookcase on the upper floor, they found eight Jewish people who had been hiding there for 761 days.

One of them was a 15-year-old girl named Anne Frank, who had been writing in her diary the entire time.

The Frank family went into hiding on July 6, 1942, to escape the Nazis during World War II. Anne's father Otto ran a business in the building and had secretly converted the rear annex into a hiding space.

The family was joined by four others: Hermann and Auguste van Pels, their teenage son Peter, and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer. Eight people in total, sharing a hidden space no bigger than a small apartment.

They never went outside. They moved in silence during business hours so workers in the building below wouldn't hear them.

They followed the Allied advance on a map Otto pinned to the wall, moving the markers each time they heard news on the radio.

After the raid, all eight were deported to concentration camps. Otto Frank was the only one to survive. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, just weeks before the camp was liberated by British forces.

When Otto returned to Amsterdam after the war, his employees Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl handed him Anne's diary, which they had found scattered on the floor after the arrest and kept safe.

Otto spent years editing and publishing it. The diary first appeared in Dutch in 1947 and has since been translated into more than 70 languages.

The annex was nearly demolished in the 1950s before a public campaign saved it. It opened as a museum in 1960, with Otto's request that the rooms remain empty, exactly as they were left.

The pencil marks Otto drew on the wall tracking Anne and Margot's heights are still there.

See Anne's original red-checked diary in its glass case. Walk the narrow staircase behind the bookcase. Stand in the room where she stuck movie star pictures on the wall and wrote about her dreams of becoming a writer. Tickets sell out weeks in advance so book early.