Anne Frank House and More

The Arson Archive

Sea Food Restaurant 

Rag Chair

Calories Burned per Stair

Exterior Anne Frank House

View down Canal at Sunset

Cocktail Hour at The Dylan

Rijsttafel (Rice Table) for 2

The weather totally cooperated today – no rain. I had been to Amsterdam, once previously over 50 years ago. Cathy had never been here. Amsterdam is small, with concentric rings of canals. We didn’t have a guide, but we had some destinations in mind and we had a map. Amazingly we were able quite easily to navigate the city.

Our first destination was a design store: Droog. When we were in London, we saw a cabinet designed by Droog at the V&A Art Museum. We decided to go to the source. Once we had found Droog, we started to explore the store. It is part Art Gallery, part design group with a sense of humor. Among our favorite objects was an aquarium with live fish and a tiny toy table set for dinner submerged in the water. It was entitled “Fish Dinner”.

A soberer piece was called the Arson Project. It had small replicas of over 400 homes of migrants that have been burned down in Germany. Each one a reminder of what still is happening. Each replica of a burned house was tagged with the actual date it happened, witnessing the ongoing refugee problems. Whimsically, the stairs at Droog are marked with calories burned climbing them. 

We returned to our hotel and then walked over to the Anne Frank House. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but it wasn’t anywhere near as powerful as this incredibly designed museum turned out to be. There are no photographs allowed in the museum. From the outside the edifice is very modern. Unlike most of Amsterdam that dates backs hundreds of years the museum structure is high tech. 

When you walk in you are handed an individual listening device that is automatically keyed to the various rooms and exhibits. Much like the hidden attic where Anne and her family lived for 2 years the real house is hidden within this modern building. You have no sense of its relationship to the modern world as you venture back to her hidden life. There are no guides, no questions from the visitors, no staff to interrogate, no talking from the people as they learn of the Holocaust’s effect on this one family.

I am sure everyone has the same questions that we did as we wondered through the actual place where they hid. How did they get food? How did they go to the bathroom? How did the diary survive? Who helped them? What happened to them? Slowly the answers are revealed as you experience the house. It is a very overwhelming experience.

There is only the description of their lives, by Anne from her diaries, from the helpers that hid them and from Anne’s father, the only member of the family who survived. Towards the end you see the actual diaries. I am sure there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.

You are also forced to wonder, was her death in vain? She lived to know of the Allied invasion of Normandy. She almost made it. Yet because she didn’t live, because she wrote the diaries, because when they were all arrested and shipped to concentration camps she was recognized by friends who survived her, because her father managed to live, because others found the diaries, because her father had the diaries published, she survives to speak for millions that never had a voice.

We decided to call it day after visiting the museum and returned to the hotel to unwind, reflect and drink.

The Dutch at one time were the most powerful empire on earth. They controlled what we now call Dutch East Indies. They brought home a food from there that has become a staple of Dutch food: Rijsttafel literally “Rice Table”. Rice is served with lots of small dishes. They are ranged in a procession of less spicy to spicier. We went to Tujuh Maret, one of the best Indonesian Restaurants in the city. The dinner was excellent, inexpensive, and enormous. We ate about half of it.

It was a great and powerful first full day in Amsterdam.