Anne Frank: the House, the Hiding Place, and What Happened After

The Frank family moved into the secret annex at Prinsengracht 263 on July 6, 1942. Anne was 13. For 761 days, eight people lived in this building: the Franks, the van Pels family, and dentist Fritz Pfeffer. They could make no noise during working hours. They could not look out the windows. Anne wrote her diary with the conviction that it would one day be published. On August 4, 1944, someone informed on them. The SS raided and arrested everyone. Miep Gies, who had supplied them with food for two years, returned that afternoon and gathered Anne's papers from the floor. She kept them without rea…

Anne Frank mentioned the Westerkerk bell more than twenty times in her diary. The 85-meter Westertoren tower marked the hours she could not live freely. "The Westertoren clock strikes every quarter of an hour," she wrote. "It gives me a sense of security." The church was built between 1620 and 1631. Rembrandt was buried here in 1669 in a pauper's grave, having died in poverty. The exact location is unknown. Today the Westerkerk rings its bells in Anne's memory on each anniversary of her death. From the annex, they could only hear it. They could never see it from outside.…

The Royal Palace on Dam Square served as Nazi occupation headquarters in the Netherlands. The Germans occupied Holland in five days in May 1940 — faster than anyone had expected. On May 7, 1945 — the day after Germany's surrender — an SS unit opened fire on the crowd celebrating the war's end on this very square. Twenty-two people died. It was the last Nazi attack on Dutch soil. The Canadian troops who liberated Amsterdam found a city on the edge of starvation: during the winter of 1944–45, the "Hunger Winter," 18,000 people died in the city from lack of food alone.…

The Jordaan was historically Amsterdam's working-class neighborhood, home to dock workers, artisans, and immigrants. When the Germans began deporting Jews, some Jordaan families hid them. Others informed on them: the Gestapo paid 7.50 guilders per reported Jew. Anyone caught hiding a Jew could be shot. Miep Gies lived in this neighborhood. So did people who actively participated in the deportations. The Netherlands had one of the lowest Jewish survival rates in Western Europe: 73% of Dutch Jews died. In France, 25% died. The difference was made by people who chose to help, to betray, or to loo…

Jodenbreestraat, the "Jews' Broad Street," was for centuries the heart of Amsterdam's Jewish community. Sephardic Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition in the 16th century settled here, alongside Ashkenazi Jews escaping Eastern European pogroms. Rembrandt lived here from 1639 to 1656 — he was fascinated by his Jewish neighbors and painted them obsessively. Before 1940, 80,000 Jews lived in Amsterdam, 13% of the population. When the war ended, fewer than 5,000 remained. The streets that had been the Jewish quarter were nearly empty. Many buildings had been looted. Wood from furniture and do…

The Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam was built in 1675 by Sephardic Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. It was one of the largest synagogues in the world at the time and remains one of Europe's most impressive. It survived the Nazi occupation intact for a pragmatic reason: German architects considered it too valuable as a historical monument to destroy. As long as no religious activity took place inside, they would leave it standing. Inside, five hundred wax candles remain the only light source — the synagogue was never electrified. Before the war, 4,000 families attended it. When the w…

On February 22, 1941, the SS surrounded this neighborhood and randomly detained 425 young Jewish men. They beat them publicly and deported them. Two days later, Amsterdam's dock workers went on a general strike. It was the only mass protest strike against the persecution of Jews in all of occupied Europe. It lasted two days. The Germans crushed it with troops. Nine union leaders were shot. The Dockworker statue, here in the square, was unveiled in 1952 to commemorate that strike. Today, every February 25, Amsterdam observes the Day of Commemoration of the February Strike at this spot.…

The Hollandsche Schouwburg was Amsterdam's main Jewish theater. In 1942, the Nazis converted it into a holding center for Jews awaiting deportation. Between 1942 and 1943, more than 46,000 people passed through here, crammed for days without adequate food or water, before being transferred to the Westerbork transit camp and then to the death camps of the East. Across the street, at the day-care center, resistance workers managed to smuggle hundreds of children out through the back door to families who hid them. Anne Frank and her family never came through here — they went into hiding before th…