I'M GRATEFUL FOR AN AFTERNOON IN AMSTERDAM

 I'm not sure that "grateful" is the right word for this occasion. "Blessed" may be the better word.  After all, how many people ever get to visit their number one bucket list location? In April, Craig and I went to Amsterdam. April is the best time to be in the Netherlands. The weather is temperate, if occasionally drizzly. The tulips are in full and fabulous bloom. (Whatever else you might do in Amsterdam, you have to see the Keukenhof Gardens. Words fail me. See picture.)

Amsterdam is the most European of cities. Ancient architecture cozies up to postwar modernist buildings. Cobblestone streets and canals. Cathedrals and museums. Streetcars and swarms of cyclists. The very few personal cars are tiny and electric which makes for surprisingly clean air for an urban area. 

As exciting as all this was, there was one reason I was in Amsterdam. Anne Frank. Amsterdam was her city and I'd wanted to see it since I read The Diary of a Young Girl in fifth grade. Never had a book affected to me the way The Diary did. I felt as though I knew Anne. I identified with a precocious girl who was not taken seriously by adults. To a degree, I knew what it was like to be a pariah in your own town. I read and re-read her book so many times as a teen that I could recite whole entries. I absorbed the geography of her world...the "secret annex" in her father's office building where she hid for 25 months with seven other people. The Westertoren of Westkirk church, just a block from the Annex, whose carillon bells comforted Anne. Her apartment home on the Merweideplein, her school and the bookstore where she first spied the red and tan plaid cloth covered notebook that became the diary...these places were as real to me as my own neighborhood. 

                                                        The Anne Frank House, Westertoren on right.

Yes, we toured the Annex (known as the Anne Frank House. Warning: you have to buy the tickets seven weeks in advance, online at the House site...on a Tuesday at 4am Eastern time. The tickets sell out for the week in under an hour...and NO tickets are sold at the house...as some disappointed tourists learned while we were there.) The house was exactly as I expected it to be...except smaller.  I have performed in the stage version of The Diary and our stage was twice the size of the tiny common room in which the Franks and the others spent their days.  That room had no windows and was incredibly stuffy. The bedrooms did have windows but with blackout shades. Each room was smaller that the one before. I could only imagine how confined all of their occupants felt, but especially lively Anne. By the time I left, I was dizzy from lack of air and too many strangers pressing against me.

The Annex smelled of old wood and faintly of canal water. The front offices were furnished with desks and office equipment and advertisements for Mr. Frank's company, Opekta. The Annex area was empty, but large picture displays showed how the rooms looked during the Frank's stay. I came away with a better understanding of how physically difficult it had been to live in the Annex, to say nothing of terrifying.  The house was a shrine to the experience of the Franks and their friends, but I had a hard time feeling their presence. The only time I felt that connection was when the Westertoren chimed. 

I had anticipated that the Annex might affect me this way. That's why I booked a private tour of Anne's neighborhood in the Rivierenbuurt (the River District). I knew I would feel Anne's spirit there. 

                                                        The Anne Frank statue 

I met my guide at the Anne Frank statue in Merwedeplein Park. The statue depicts Anne the day she left her home for the last time...dressed in layers of clothes, her school bag under one arm and a small satchel in hand. That July day was warm and rainy; the family had a nearly 3 mile walk to the Annex.

Wide sidewalks border the park. The many pictures of Anne and her friends playing hopscotch and jumprope on that pavement came to mind. The neighborhood was built in 1929. By the time that the Franks' moved there from Germany in 1934, the park perimeter was marked by low, neatly trimmed hedges. No trees. Today the area is a lovely, leafy urban oasis. Tidy brick apartment flats face each other across the park. The Franks lived on the second floor at Number 37. The apartment has been restored to its pre-war appearance but is not open to the public. Instead, it's a retreat for refugee writers who cannot write freely in their home countries. (Anne would've liked that!) 

                                                                Number 37 Merweideplein

I have read every book published by Anne's friends, a surprisingly large number of whom survived the Holocaust. The Merweidepleine of the 1930's was almost entirely populated by German Jews, fleeing Hitler. Anne's girlfriends--Hanne, Sanne, Jacque, Nanny and Ilse--were constantly in an out of each other's apartments, They announced their presence by whistling through the mail slot in the front door. Anne could not whistle, but she could sing. She sang a series of notes--la-la-la-- into the slot, and her friends would know it was her. 

Around the corner stood the  bicycle sheds where Anne kept her beloved bike, until the Nazis forced the Jews to surrender them. The bike sheds also served as a sort of hangout place for the children before and after school. More than once Anne's diary speaks of meeting "an attractive boy"at the sheds. (Anne was quite the flirt.)

                                                               Montessori 6th (still a school)

                                                          
It must've been a short but pleasant bike ride to Anne's beloved Montessori School. Anne loved school and was heartbroken when the Nazis evicted Jews from "gentile schools" in 1941. She skipped a grade so she could join her older sister Margot at the Jewish Lyceum. The Lyceum was nearly three miles away from the Merweideplein without the benefit of bikes. The girls only attended the Lyceum for the 1941-42 school year. In the fall of 1942, the school closed because most of the students had been deported or were in hiding, including Anne and Margot.

With the 1940 Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, Jews were prohibited from most public areas--city parks, beaches, swimming pools, tennis courts, cinemas, theaters and on and on. Anne and her friends compensated for the lack of outside entertainment by forming a ping pong club since most of them had access to a table and equipment at home. After a strenuous afternoon of ping-pong, the girls would go in search of refreshment, at one of the two neighborhood ice cream parlors that would still serve Jews. This is one of them, the Adelphi.  Today it is a Japanese-Peruvian eatery, but Anne's image is immortalized inside.

It was a warm spring afternoon when my guide and I strolled the sidewalks of Anne's neighborhood. He was as versed in "Anne Lore" as I and we chatter about Anne and Margot and Hanne and Ilse as if they were our own friends. I felt as if one of the girls might suddenly pop from around a corner and say "hi." 

One of the honest surprises I encountered was the home of Miep Gies. As you might recall, Miep worked in Mr. Frank's office as a bookkeeper, and was one of the "Helpers" who kept the occupants of the Annex alive with forged ration cards, food and library deliveries, and anything else eight people in hiding might need to survive. I did not realize that Miep and her husband Jan's apartment was just around the corner from the Merweideplein. There is a tiny citizen's garden there, dedicated to Miep's memory.

Just outside the Merweidepleine we came to "Anne's bookshop" where her father bought her diary as a 13th birthday present. The same family still operates the store. Sadly, it was not open the day I visited but I saw a great deal through the plate glass windows that covered both street sides. Not surprisingly, the window displays were all copies of books about Anne, and the diary, translated into many languages. 

My tour ended back in front of Number 37 Merweidepleine. My guide pointed out something I had not noticed before, but that I had seen in the sidewalks throughout the afternoon. Embedded in the pavement were four small brass plates, one for each member of the Frank family.

"These are stolperstein," my guide explained. "These are memorial plaques for Holocaust victims, placed in front of their homes. These began in Germany about thirty years, and are now on sidewalks throughout Europe. "Stolpersteine" means "stumbling stone."  They are meant to be happened or stumbled upon, in memory of those who suffered under the Nazis. You have to stoop to read them, thus "bowing" to the memory of the person."

Each "stone" contains the person's birthdate, date they went into hiding. date of arrest, camps/prisons where they were held, and death date. Of the four Franks (and the eight in the Secret Annex) only Otto Frank survived the war.

I left "Anne's World" that sunny afternoon feeling that I had truly spent a couple of hours with her spirit. I feel very grateful. Also I am determined, to the best of my ability, to let the world "never forget."

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman