Anne Frank House Visit 8/27/2005

Man in white jacket closest to window if father of boy in wheel chair. Picture taken from inside the admission area of the Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, Saturday August 27, 2005

Father had just come in before Sally, Kathrin & I bought our tickets and entered the house. The father was asking what sort of accommodations were available for his son. The answer was "none." But the father was persistent and asked several more detailed questions. He ended up accepting the conditions and saying that he would leave the wheel chair outside the house and do what he could to carry or help support his son as they worked their way up the narrow staircases and through the rooms of the "annex" in which the Anne Frank and her family and close friends managed to hide for more than two years during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.

The father said that he would do this because visiting this house meant so much to his son.

We heard that more than 600,000 people make the trip to Amsterdam and take the time to wait in line, etc. to go through this house even now - 60 years after the Franks were taken from the house, and all died except the father and Anne Frank's writings.

For me, this was a more painfully moving experience than visiting the Holocaust museum in DC. As I went through the latter, I became kind of numb and simply couldn't grasp the magnitude of what we were being forced to see and what it represented. In the Anne Frank house, we were shown the details of a bizarre portion of a young girl's life with excruciating implications; but we weren't forced to face the concentration camp horrors until we had been fully engaged in this much more comprehensible and highly contained physical space and the other collected evidence of Anne Frank's life and vitality. For me, it made the holocaust aspects even more painful and incomprehensible.

And then we emerged into a beautiful end-of-summer day in Amsterdam 2005 and the pleasures of riding bicycles together and appreciating what it is to have a living daughter even more than usual. The day before she departs for a few months in Munich.

The Anne Frank house is a beautiful and terrible reminder of the evil we are capable of doing when we allow ourselves to see people as "others" who are somehow less than human, when we allow ourselves to do anything less than respect the spark of goodness and humanity we share, or to allow that spark to flicker out - in ourselves or in anyone else we can help.

Love to all,
Steve