Avalon Visionary Rhine River Cruise - Days 2 & 3 - Amsterdam

Oct. 28 & 29, 2012 – Amsterdam

“One day this terrible war will be over.  The time will come when we’ll be people again and not just Jews! – Anne Frank  11 April 1944

On Sunday, Oct. 28, we awoke to an overcast sky and a windy, blustery day.  On our agenda for the day was a trip to the Anne Frank House.  We walked from our hotel, the NH Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky, through the Dam Square and about five or six blocks to this incredible museum.  I had pre-purchased our tickets for an assigned time to go through the house, and it’s really a good thing that I did.  The queue wound around the house and down a couple of blocks for those without tickets.  There must have been over 100 people waiting to purchase tickets. 

I had watched the movie, “The Diary of Anne Frank”, a few months ago, but seeing the close quarters that this family and their friends lived in for over two years during the Nazi occupation of Holland during World War II, was so moving.  One of the things that amazed me was that no one spoke while they were going through the house.  It is like being on sacred ground. 

The Anne Frank House’s museum is unique.  It is the hiding place where Anne Frank wrote her diary during World War II.  There is a set route through the house that you must follow.  A couple of the many things that made such an impression on me was the size of the small rooms and the narrowness and steep of the stairs.  There were eight people who occupied a space of less than 800 square feet – Anne, her parents, Otto and Edith Frank, her sister, Margot, Hermann, Auguste, and Peter Van Daan (pseudonym  for van Pels in the Diary), and Fritz Pfeffer  (pseudonym for Albert Dussel).  These people had to stay indoors 24 hours a day.  The curtains were always kept closed, so the neighbors could not see them.  Below the house is a warehouse that continued to operate while they were in hiding.  During the day, when the employees were there, all of them had to sit still and not make a sound.  They could not run any water nor flush the toilet. 

There is no longer any furniture in the house because Anne’s father who survived the concentration camp did not want to replace it after the Nazis had emptied all of its contents.  However, the walls of this house can tell so many secrets, and just by being in it and seeing the close quarters and how they had to live was such a moving experience.

Today we took a leisurely canal cruise all around the city of Amsterdam.  There are houses here that are actually crooked from the years of the marshy sub-soil under them settling.  Our ship sailed at noon and we are now en route to Cologne, Germany.  More tomorrow.